Heroku

Heroku is a cloud platform-as-a-service founded in 2007 by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry, acquired by Salesforce in 2010 for two hundred twelve million dollars, pioneering the platform-as-a-service model that abstracts away server management, enabling developers to deploy applications through Git push with automatic build, scale, and manage, supporting Node.js, Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, Go, Scala, and Clojure, adopted by over thirteen million applications from startups to enterprises including Toyota, Mazda, Citrix, and Urban Outfitters. The deployment workflow uses Git as the deployment mechanism, where pushing to a Heroku remote triggers an automatic build process that detects the language and framework, installs dependencies, compiles assets, and produces a ready-to-run application image, with buildpacks providing extensible build logic for each supported language and custom buildpacks for specialized requirements. The dyno architecture provides lightweight containers that run application processes, with web dynos handling HTTP requests, worker dynos processing background jobs, and scheduler dynos running periodic tasks, with horizontal scaling by adding dynos and vertical scaling by selecting dyno types from free through performance tiers, and automatic restart on crash and dyno cycling for reliability. The add-on ecosystem provides over two hundred third-party services including databases, caching, monitoring, logging, search, email, SMS, and analytics, integrated through a unified billing interface with free tiers for development and evaluation. The Heroku Postgres provides managed PostgreSQL with automated backups, follower databases, and data clips. The Heroku Connect synchronizes data with Salesforce. The pipeline feature enables continuous delivery workflow. Designed for startups, small teams, and developers prioritizing simplicity over infrastructure control.