Heroku

Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) that enables developers to build, run, and scale applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. It provides an abstraction layer that handles deployment, provisioning, and runtime management, allowing teams to focus on application code.

Founded in 2007 by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry, Heroku began as a platform for Ruby applications. Salesforce.com acquired Heroku in 2010 for around $212 million, and the service has since operated as part of the Salesforce Platform, expanding its language support, ecosystem, and enterprise features.

Deployment and runtime are centered on dynos, containers that execute applications. Developers push code via Git (or integrate with CI pipelines); Heroku automatically builds the app using language-specific buildpacks, resolves dependencies, and runs the app on dynos. The platform offers a marketplace of add-ons for databases, caching, messaging, monitoring, and other services, plus pipelines for continuous delivery and Review Apps for ephemeral environments.

Officially supported languages include Ruby, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, Go, Scala, and Clojure, with broader language support via community buildpacks. The primary data service is Heroku Postgres, complemented by other managed data stores and add-ons. Apps typically run on public cloud infrastructure, with AWS as the underlying provider, and can scale by adjusting the number and type of dynos.

As a platform focused on developer experience, Heroku emphasizes simplicity and rapid iteration, though it offers less fine-grained control than infrastructure-as-a-service alternatives and can be more expensive at scale. Pricing arrangements cover a range of dyno types and associated add-ons, catering to small projects through enterprise deployments.