VMblog: What is Heroku and what message will an attendee hear from you this year? What will they take back to help sell their management team and decision makers?

Betty Junod:  Heroku is a platform for AI apps in many languages. The challenge is to accelerate time-to-market and improve productivity at optimal costs. That is at the core of Heroku's value proposition, especially in the face of evolving technology landscapes. As part of the Salesforce portfolio, Heroku provides a platform as a service that helps teams build, deploy, manage, and scale their custom apps securely and effortlessly in the cloud. Heroku brings together IaaS, DevOps, and developer platform capabilities with a set of opinions that bake-in best practices and automates them, streamlining the experience for both developers and operators.

This year our focus is on providing more capabilities to application teams like AI, .NET, and VS Code without adding more complexity. AI is a whole new ecosystem-in addition to cloud-native technologies-that decision makers need to understand and evaluate alongside their application portfolio.

One of our customers in healthcare recently said something that sums this up... "Heroku is as trustworthy as AWS but as simple as Digital Ocean."

VMblog: Where can attendees find you at the event? What interactive experiences, demos, or activities have you planned for your booth?

Junod:  The Heroku team has a number of activities planned at KubeCon and we are looking forward to meeting you all in London! Attendees can find us at booth S250 (it will be purple!) where we'll be featuring demos showcasing the development-to-deploy workflow, how to easily add AI capabilities like LLMs or RAG to your apps, and building custom agents from the Heroku CLI without changing tools or context. Our engineers and developer advocates will be on hand to answer your questions about Heroku, app dev, and more.

VMblog: What's your elevator pitch for a CTO or CIO? How does your solution impact the bottom line?

Junod:  The Heroku platform is designed to help technology teams deliver value faster and at greater levels of reliability and efficiency than before, with the unit of value being software, a set of features, or a complete digital product. This means teams are able to support business growth and improve customer satisfaction while keeping costs and operating burdens low. Here's just a sample of what our customers have to say about their experience with Heroku: 

"Heroku has been transformative for our business, drastically reducing our time-to-market, deploying in days rather than months. As our customer base has grown significantly, Heroku has scaled seamlessly with our needs, maintaining 99.9% uptime throughout our growth journey. Our development team can push updates multiple times daily, allowing us to respond to customer feedback within hours instead of weeks. As we've scaled, Heroku has helped us focus entirely on building features that matter to customers rather than spending time on managing complex infrastructure." Ray Rhodes, CTO of UserEvidence

"By simplifying our operations, we have reduced our time spent on managing infrastructure by 70-80%, monitoring the health of applications has greatly improved, and the ability to scale our applications in a low friction way has been of immense business value. " Taylor Boon, VP of Software Development at CFG Merchant Solutions

"Heroku's robust and scalable platform has empowered Leave a Nest to overcome significant challenges, streamline their operations, and continue to innovate in the field of science and technology education and research. Additionally, Heroku's dynamic scalability provided a cost-efficient solution, enabling us to support an approximately 4900% increase in users without compromising performance. This allowed us to strategically manage resources and reduce costs, benefiting our developers by freeing up time to focus on innovation and service enhancement." George Yoshida, CIO of Leave a Nest

"Heroku has significantly improved the speed and reliability of our solution delivery, drastically improving patient care. We can go from a customer conversation to a solution delivered to production in minutes." Mark Johnson, CEO of Cardiobase

VMblog: What are the remaining barriers to Kubernetes adoption in 2025? Can you double click on your company's technologies and talk about how you solve these challenges for a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendee.

Junod:  When you reflect on the last CNCF annual survey, you'll see that while an overwhelming majority are actively using Kubernetes, a good number of them are likely adopting the technology in pockets-and there remains significant challenges like security, complexity, monitoring, lack of training, and team culture changes that are barriers to adoption...especially at scale.

At the heart of this is complexity. With hundreds of open-source projects in various stages of maturity and multitudes of commercialized options for each project, it can be daunting to evaluate all the technology options, understand how to integrate them, monitor, and lifecycle manage each component before a single app is ever deployed.

The end goal isn't the adoption of Kubernetes itself, but the promise of what technologies like Kubernetes provide: better automation, scale, and reliability for the apps that are important to us.

Heroku is a platform-as-a-service for custom apps in any language. We bring together many technologies from within the broader CNCF landscape and elsewhere, integrate them with a set of best practices (aka opinions), provide developer and operator user experiences, and deliver the whole stack as a unified platform experience and managed service.

Operational Complexity: Heroku abstracts away the complexity of integrating and managing individual technologies and infrastructure into a platform so that teams can spend more time delivering value to their customers and business. Heroku brings the power of technologies like Kubernetes, Open Telemetry, Cloud Native Buildpacks, Kafka, Valkey, Postgres, and more into a streamlined and automated experience that improve delivery, security and reliability.

Developer Experience: Heroku meets developers where they are by providing extensions for popular IDEs like VS Code,  by supporting multiple languages (.NET, Java, Go, Node.js, Ruby, Python, Scala, PHP, and Clojure), and by providing easy access to data services, AI, and ecosystem tools through a streamlined developer experience.

VMblog: Is your company involved in or presenting any sessions during the event?

Junod:  Yes, our team is hosting a number of sessions and activities throughout the conference. Below is a summary of talks and discussions that folks can join, and you can view all session details here.

• Focus on your apps not infrastructure with Heroku| April 3, 12:45 PM BST

Join  Andrew Fawcett, (VP of Developer Relations, Heroku) to see a live demo of deploying an AI-enabled web application powered by Heroku's fully managed compute, data, and AI services.

• Workload Identity for Humans: A Twelve-Factor Approach| April 3, 4:45 PM BST

Vish Abrams (Chief Architect, Heroku) will draw on the principles of Twelve-Factor Applications to explore how to integrate workload identity into cloud-native applications in a way that feels natural and productive for developers.

• Building WebAssembly Like It's 2011|April 2, 2:30 PM BST

Featuring speakers David Justice (Microsoft) and Terence Lee (SWE Architect, Heroku), this session will discuss how building WebAssembly (Wasm) components is a complex process which can cause folks a lot of pain when getting started.

• Twelve-Factor Discussion Group | April 2 and 4, 1:00 PM BST | South Gallery Room 23, 2nd Floor

Join Vish Abrams (Chief Architect, Heroku) and Terence Lee (SWE Architect, Heroku)  for an interactive discussion on the 12-Factor methodology. [Register Here]

• Developer Experience Discussion Group | April 3, 11:00 AM BST | South Gallery Room 23, 2nd Floor Gallery of Excel London

Join Laura Tacho (CTO, DX) and myself for a discussion on developer experience, sharing practical guidance for your team. [Register Here]

VMblog: Are you hosting any special events, meetups, or after-hours gatherings during KubeCon? Can you give us the details and links?

Junod:  Absolutely! No KubeCon is complete without the ability to connect with the community. We are happy to host an evening social with AWS at Fremantle Bar & Kitchen on Thursday night, April 3 at 6:00 PM. We'll be hosting snacks and drinks, and look forward to seeing everyone there. Register here to save your spot.

Additionally, I'm personally hosting a "Table for 10" for Kubernetes end users and open source community members to help make new connections, discuss our needs and challenges with the technologies, and share our respective cloud-native adoption stories. We still have a few spots left and folks can DM me for a spot.

VMblog: What big changes or trends does your company see taking shape for 2025? How do you see the cloud-native landscape evolving and what should organizations be preparing for?

Junod:  ICYMI... AI, AI, AI. This entire area of technology is moving beyond fast. What's most interesting is that GenAI and natural language will bring in a wave of new app builders that will never write a line of code-and what we haven't figured out yet is how the SDLC will evolve (yet again) to accommodate new people and tools.

• From a workload, PoV, Heroku has been continuously evolving to address the needs of AI and ML workloads as they become integral to modern applications, while maintaining our core value proposition of simplifying complexity, delivering productive developer experiences, and streamlining ongoing operations.

• Developer Experience: Heroku supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, enabling developers to build AI capabilities with the languages and tools they prefer.

• Managed Inference and Agents: We've added AI to streamline the experience of building and managing custom AI apps in any language alongside your data and AI models in one trusted environment. This provides safe execution of AI-generated code during agentic workflows, plus secures access to tools and resources like databases and add-ons. [MIA is available today in pilot]

• Agentforce and AppLink: As part of the Salesforce portfolio, Heroku brings custom actions and experiences written in any language to the low-code admin experience. This powerful combination unlocks the creative potential of Salesforce admins and Heroku developers to address more agentic use cases. [AppLink is available today in pilot.]

• Heroku-Jupyter: Data scientists and ML developers are often challenged in setting up and configuring their Jupyter environments. This new open-source solution delivers a production-ready cloud-based Jupyter environment in minutes without the challenges of storage or complex configurations. 

• Platform Scalability and Automated Operations: We continue to innovate and update the Heroku platform to provide scalable, reliable, performant infrastructure that adjusts to the needs of your apps without complexity or manual work.

VMblog: What are you personally most interested in seeing or learning at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon?

Junod:  I am always super excited to attend KubeCon to catch up with members of the broader community-from the folks at CNCF to project maintainers, vendors like us, and end users. The end-user stories on how they are using the various projects in their organizations, and the transformations that had to occur to go from point A to B are always interesting lessons for me. I'm looking forward to seeing which projects are headed to graduation and what new ideas the community is bringing to bear. The beauty of open source is that its innovation is a collective effort across like-minded technologies across many companies, so projects can move very fast.