Heroku Introduces New Innovations to Expand the Capabilities of Every Salesforce Org

Today’s businesses face a tremendous amount of complexity in tools, data silos, and systems that teams need to navigate to deliver unique and engaging experiences to their customers. Meanwhile developers are only able to spend a fraction of their time coding due to the cognitive load of technology complexity, constant context switching, and figuring out how to adopt AI effectively into their daily work.

The Heroku AI PaaS is the Cloud Native Application Platform from Salesforce to seamlessly build and scale any custom service for greenfield app development, modernizing existing apps, and as part of a Salesforce cloud implementation.

At Dreamforce, we are excited to introduce new innovations to our AI PaaS that expand the capabilities of every Salesforce org and empower new builders. Today’s announcement includes innovations in three key areas:

1. Expanding the capabilities of every Salesforce org with the flexibility of more pro-code and elastic compute with enterprise performance, scale and security enhancements.
2. Enhancing and expanding the data foundation to empower our customers’ modern and AI app strategies.
3. Delivering new vibes using AI to make the process of building new applications as accessible as sending a text message.

Expanding the capabilities of every Salesforce org with AppLink

Following up to our July release of AppLink, a feature that seamlessly and securely connects custom services on Heroku with workflows and configurations in Salesforce Platform, Agentforce, and Data Cloud, we are delivering the following enhancements:

• Enhanced Security with support for JWT auth enables Heroku to provide custom user facing experiences for headless Agentforce deployments.
• Scalability and Performance with a 4X increase in the invocation rate throughput to handle higher levels of traffic and more complex operations with greater efficiency.
• Automation with Open API Spec to streamline Agentforce topic generation. Eliminate manual steps and errors by using annotations to speed up your configuration, deployment, and time to market.

Enhancing our data foundation to empower AI

Heroku’s long history in managed data services continues to innovate and evolve to meet the changing demands on data for modern, AI powered solutions. Our innovations focus on futurizing our data foundations and delivering unique capabilities to Salesforce orgs and Data Cloud.

• Next Gen Heroku Postgres replatforms the popular Postgres offering to enhance performance, deliver massive scale, and deliver storage flexibility, zero downtime provisioning and updates, and user experience improvements to enable developers to build the apps of the future. Read more here.
• Expanding Heroku Connect capabilities to support data synchronization for 170+ standard Salesforce objects and adopting CDC Accelerated Polling to go from an update every 10 minutes to event-based and sync changes as they happen.
• Heroku for Data Cloud leverages AppLink to bring the power of industry programming languages to build and run custom apps against your Data Cloud, provide complimentary data services to optimize Data Cloud architectures, and the beta of Zero Copy for Heroku Postgres to enable customers to easily bring their existing data into a unified Data Cloud for a fuller picture of their customer and to enable Agentforce agents.

Bringing AI vibes to how new apps are built and deployed

Software development has largely been the domain of technical experts specialized in specific programming languages, frameworks, and tools making it inaccessible to those in non-technical backgrounds. While the demand for new apps has continued to grow, the available developer tools have only increased in complexity and increased cognitive load on a highly constrained group of skilled professionals. Enter AI and vibe coding to provide a new experience that makes creating apps as intuitive as sending text messages.

• Heroku Vibes is an AI-powered, collaborative agent experience for both developers and non-developers to create and deploy new applications in minutes using natural language instructions. Heroku Vibes takes those instructions to prepare a spec driven development plan, provisions the required infrastructure, and automatically deploys the application for the user. Learn more and try it here.

AI is rapidly changing the landscape of app creation and what these new apps can do. With more creators entering the space, the friction and gap for secure delivery and challenges of being performant at scale will only compound. Heroku AI PaaS is about solving the challenges at every step along the way – so that your team can focus on what’s important – building value for your customers, employees, and business.