Salesforce is reallocating resources away from its Heroku platform-as-a-service offering to prioritize other segments of its business.
This strategic shift was announced in a blog post by Heroku's Chief Product Officer, Nitin Bhat. He stated that Salesforce will cease offering new enterprise account subscriptions. The company also plans to scale back the development of new features for Heroku, though it intends to release an updated version of the platform's managed PostgreSQL service that was recently announced. Concurrently, Salesforce will continue to issue cybersecurity and reliability updates.
Launched in 2007 as a startup, Heroku was a cloud platform designed for hosting Ruby applications. Salesforce acquired it four years later for $212 million. Over the following years, the cloud giant expanded Heroku's capabilities by adding support for programming languages beyond Ruby and enhancing its feature set in other areas.
Heroku operates customer workloads within Linux containers known as dynos. These containers are orchestrated by an engine called the dyno manager, which can detect software issues within a dyno and restart it. If an outage stems from underlying hardware failure, the dyno manager automatically migrates the affected workloads to a new server.
The service provides dynos alongside more advanced application building blocks. One of its most popular offerings is Heroku Postgres, a managed relational database. It automates not only infrastructure maintenance but also a range of other tasks. The service performs regular content backups and allows developers to quickly create database copies for testing and load balancing purposes.
In recent years, Salesforce has rolled out updates aimed at making Heroku more suitable for AI workloads. For instance, Heroku Postgres gained support for an open-source tool called pgvector. This enables the database to store embeddings—mathematical objects used by AI models to retain information.
When Salesforce purchased Heroku in 2011, the industry's three major public clouds had already been established for several years, yet their platform-as-a-service functionalities were relatively limited. Today, leading cloud providers offer alternatives to Heroku's core components. This increased competition likely influenced Salesforce's decision to transition the platform into a maintenance mode.
Feature overlap between Heroku and some newer Salesforce products may also be a contributing factor. Heroku includes a service named Managed Inference and Agents, which developers can use to create custom AI agents. In 2024, Salesforce introduced a tool called Agent Builder, offering similar capabilities.
"We are focusing our product and engineering investments on areas that deliver the greatest long-term customer value, including helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted manner," Bhat wrote in today's blog post.
Existing Heroku users with enterprise account contracts will retain the ability to renew their subscriptions. Furthermore, both existing and new customers who pay via credit card can continue using the platform. Bhat confirmed that pricing, billing, and other key aspects of the user experience will remain unchanged.
