Gail Frederick, posting on the Heroku blog:

Over the past year, Heroku has been on a journey of reflection as we rebase the platform to address the changing needs of app teams toward the future without disrupting your business. In the Heroku way, we want to be thoughtful about your experience as we evolve.

When we started Heroku, it was the early days of cloud computing, before Docker and Kubernetes were household names in IT. We launched Heroku (and the platform-as-a-service category) to help teams get to the cloud easily with an elegant user experience in front of a powerful platform that automated a lot of the manual work that slowed teams down. To do that then, we had to build a lot of the tooling ourselves, like orchestration and self-hosting the databases in AWS. The platform delivered customers the outcomes they needed to deploy apps quickly and scale effortlessly in the cloud —all without having to worry about how the platform worked. […]

We’re excited to announce Heroku’s Next Generation Platform-as-a-Service that continues to deliver on this mission, addressing the needs of cloud-native and AI app delivery at scale with a delightful developer experience and a streamlined operator experience

Heroku had been the gold standard for developer productivity and hosting for so long. It was just so great and easy to deploy. Yes, it gets expensive as an app scales up, but for me it had always been worth the extra cost for peace of mind and not requiring a dedicated devops engineer on staff.

That time ended a few years ago. For some reason Salesforce has really neglected this platform that was once so great. I still use Heroku, but am actively researching better and more modern options.

In a related post, the new Fir stack is explained by Terence Lee:

Fir is still the Heroku you know and love. It’s rooted in the world renowned developer experience while built on a bedrock of security and stability. We achieve this by offering seamless functionality out of the box with the flexibility to customize as needed. In today’s complex development landscape, minimizing cognitive load is crucial.

Nice to see the embrace of existing open source tooling here instead of inventing something new when the rest of the industry has moved on.

This announcement is timely and interesting for me. Maybe they’ve been listening to feedback this entire time? Consider me very cautiously optimistic.