Heroku (company)

Heroku (company)
Name	Heroku
Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Cloud computing
Founded	2007
Founders	James Lindenbaum; Adam Wiggins; Orion Henry
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States
Parent	Salesforce

Heroku (company) Heroku is a cloud platform company providing platform-as-a-service hosting and deployment for web applications. Founded in 2007 by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry, the company grew within the Ruby on Rails and web application ecosystems before acquisition by Salesforce in 2010 and later integration with enterprise cloud offerings. Heroku's platform targets developers working with languages such as Ruby (programming language), Python (programming language), Java (programming language), and Node.js, offering an abstraction over infrastructure and operational concerns.

History

Heroku was founded in 2007 amid the rise of Ruby on Rails alongside startups like GitHub and Basecamp; its early history intersects with the growth of Amazon Web Services and the maturation of the Platform as a Service market. In 2010 Heroku was acquired by Salesforce for approximately $212 million, during a period when Marc Benioff pursued expansion of Salesforce's developer ecosystem. Post-acquisition events included integration with Force.com and competition with offerings from Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Heroku competitors such as Engine Yard and Cloud Foundry. Heroku's timeline includes leadership changes tied to figures from Twitter, Facebook, and Y Combinator alumni; strategic shifts paralleled industry moves by Red Hat and VMware into hybrid cloud. The company weathered ecosystem transitions such as the rise of Docker and Kubernetes, the emergence of devops tooling like Chef (software) and Puppet (software), and the adoption of continuous integration practices exemplified by Travis CI and CircleCI. Heroku's development roadmap reflected influences from projects like PostgreSQL, Redis, and Memcached, and its community included contributors from Open source foundations and academic projects at institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Products and Services

Heroku offers application hosting via dynos, buildpacks, and add-ons that integrate services such as PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and RabbitMQ. Its product suite has included managed services comparable to Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, and Microsoft Azure SQL Database, with third-party add-ons from vendors like SendGrid, Papertrail, and New Relic. For developer workflows, Heroku supports Git-based deployment, integrations with GitHub, Bitbucket, and CI/CD tools including Jenkins and GitLab CI. Heroku also provides features for application scaling, logging, monitoring, and metrics compatible with standards used by Prometheus and Grafana. Enterprise offerings align with governance and identity solutions from Okta, Ping Identity, and Active Directory, while developer experience tools mirror functionality of Heroku Scheduler and community buildpacks inspired by Buildpack API conventions. The marketplace and ecosystem include partnerships with cloud providers and software vendors like MongoDB, Inc., Pivotal Software, and Stripe (company).

Architecture and Technology

Heroku's architecture historically combined lightweight containers called dynos running on virtual machines provisioned on infrastructure such as Amazon EC2 and later on multiple cloud backends. Its runtime model uses buildpacks to detect language and framework, echoing patterns from Phusion Passenger and Rack (software) for Ruby (programming language) apps and from Werkzeug and Django for Python (programming language) apps. Data services rely on PostgreSQL as a primary datastore with extensions such as PostGIS and replication models similar to practices in MySQL clusters and MariaDB. Caching and queueing integrate Redis (software) and RabbitMQ patterns used by projects like Celery (software). Networking and routing employ techniques akin to HAProxy and NGINX load balancing, and logging pipelines are compatible with Syslog and the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana). The platform abstracts container orchestration challenges later addressed by Kubernetes and influenced by orchestration systems such as Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm.

Business Model and Corporate Structure

Heroku operates a freemium and paid subscription model, offering tiered dyno sizes, managed data services, and enterprise support contracts targeted at companies that also use Salesforce CRM products. The revenue model includes marketplace add-on commissions and usage-based billing similar to Amazon Web Services billing and Google Cloud Platform pricing. As a subsidiary of Salesforce, Heroku is part of Salesforce's broader product organization alongside Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud, reporting through corporate structures influenced by Oracle Corporation and SAP SE acquisitions and integrations. Heroku's customer base ranges from startups incubated by Y Combinator to enterprise customers in sectors represented by Forbes 500 companies, with procurement and compliance processes similar to other enterprise SaaS vendors like Workday.

Security and Compliance

Heroku maintains security controls and compliance programs aligning with standards such as SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, and PCI DSS for payment processing integrations, and supports data residency features comparable to offerings from Google Cloud Platform regions and Amazon Web Services availability zones. Operational security includes vulnerability management, patching practices echoing OpenSSL remediation processes, and incident response playbooks influenced by guidance from NIST and CERT Coordination Center. Identity and access management integrates with providers like Okta and Azure Active Directory, while encryption standards follow protocols from TLS and AES. Heroku has responded to security incidents with advisories and mitigations in coordination with projects such as OpenSSL and OpenSSH and with disclosure practices used by Bugcrowd and HackerOne programs.

Reception and Impact

Heroku has been credited with lowering barriers for web developers, influencing developer platform design alongside GitHub and Travis CI, and shaping education in web application deployment used in curricula at institutions like Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. It has been praised by entrepreneurs in the startup ecosystem and cited in analyses by TechCrunch, The Verge, and Wired (magazine). Critics compared Heroku's pricing and lock‑in to alternatives like AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google App Engine, and discussions in communities such as Stack Overflow and Hacker News debated trade-offs versus container orchestration solutions like Kubernetes. Heroku's marketplace fostered third-party ecosystems analogous to Salesforce AppExchange and demonstrated impacts on cloud developer productivity that influenced strategic investments by companies such as Microsoft and Google (company).

Category:Cloud platforms Category:Software companies based in California