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Engineering

Securing Salesforce Integrations with Heroku AppLink

Salesforce customers often leverage third-party or custom services to extend their orgs, and they do so with two common options: Connected Apps and External Services. Connected Apps let third-party vendors or custom code call Salesforce APIs using long-lived OAuth tokens, while External Services call vendor APIs through declarative configurations with vendor-managed hosting, scaling, and endpoint security. While both approaches deliver functionality, the dynamic security threat landscape challenges us to continuously improve the risk and governance of our applications.

Heroku AppLink improves your security model and provides a managed bridge between Salesforce and Heroku, so developers or vendors can deploy services in any language and expose them as native Salesforce actions. Heroku AppLink automatically handles authentication, service discovery, and request validation while its service mesh and short-lived credentials mean that your integrations no longer depend on stored credentials or exposed endpoints. Development teams can reuse existing code and libraries instead of rewriting in Apex, admins get centralized visibility into connections and authorizations, and security teams gain tighter trust boundaries across both Connected App and External Service scenarios.

Triage and Fix with Confidence: heroku run and OTel on Heroku Fir

When Production Goes Sideways

Imagine this: It’s 2 AM, your phone buzzes with an alert, and your dashboards are screaming. Production is down. Sound familiar? An automated health check has failed, and your internal dashboards are showing a spike in errors. You’ve just pushed a new release that included a critical database schema change, and a background worker task that relies on it is now failing. The web application is still running, but users are starting to report issues. You need to investigate and fix the problem, but doing so on a running production dyno could be risky and…

Amazon Nova Models: Now Available on Heroku

Building intelligent applications requires powerful, cost-effective AI. Today, we’re simplifying that process by making Amazon’s cutting-edge Nova models directly available via Heroku Managed Inference and Agents . Provisioning these models is as simple as attaching the add-on to your Heroku application, providing a direct, managed path for developers and businesses to leverage a new class of powerful and cost-effective AI models with unparalleled simplicity.

Heroku AI Expands Model Offering with OpenAI’s gpt-oss-120b

Start building with OpenAI’s new open-weight model, gpt-oss-120b, now available on Heroku Managed Inference and Agents . This gives developers a powerful, transparent, and flexible way to build and deploy AI applications on the platform they already trust. Access gpt-oss-120b with our OpenAI-compatible chat completions API , which you can drop into any OpenAI-compatible SDK or framework.

Building Data-Aware AI Applications with Heroku AI and LlamaIndex

Building AI applications that can interact with private data is a common goal for many organizations. The challenge often lies in connecting large language models (LLMs) with proprietary datasets. A combination of Heroku Managed Inference and Agents and LlamaIndex provides an elegant stack for this purpose.

This post explores how to use these tools to build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications. We’ll cover the technical components, Use Cases and the development process, and how to get started.

AppLink Fundamentals III: Building with AppLink – Development Flow and Language Choices

This blog series has taken you on a journey through the world of AppLink, from its foundational concepts and core components in Heroku AppLink: Extend Salesforce with Any Programming Language , to a deep dive into its key integration patterns in AppLink Fundamentals I: AppLink Integration Patterns – Connecting Salesforce to Heroku Applications , and then we explored advanced integrations with Data Cloud, automation, and AI in AppLink Fundamentals II: Advanced AppLink Integrations – Automation & AI . Now, in this final installment, we turn our attention to the practical aspects of building with AppLink, focusing on the development workflow,…

AppLink Fundamentals II: Advanced AppLink Integrations – Automation & AI

In our previous posts, we introduced Heroku AppLink and explored its foundational integration patterns for connecting Heroku applications with Salesforce. Now, we’ll delve into how AppLink truly expands Salesforce capabilities, focusing on advanced integrations with Data Cloud, Flow, Apex, and Agentforce. This blog will highlight how AppLink empowers you to infuse your Salesforce orgs with powerful external logic, real-time data processing, and intelligent automation.

AppLink Fundamentals I: AppLink Integration Patterns – Connecting Salesforce to Heroku Applications

In our previous post , we introduced AppLink as a powerful new way to extend Salesforce with any programming language at any scale, detailing its core components and overarching benefits. Now, we’ll dive deeper into the practical application of AppLink by exploring its primary integration patterns. Understanding these patterns is key to leveraging AppLink effectively, as they dictate how your Heroku applications interact with and enhance your Salesforce orgs.

Heroku AppLink: Extend Salesforce with Any Programming Language

The Salesforce platform offers a powerful array of tools for customization and building customer-centric experiences, from no-code automation with Flow, Prompt Builder, and Agent Builder, to robust Apex and Lightning Web Components. The art lies in choosing the right blend of these tools to achieve agility, optimize skill sets, and quickly adapt to business demands. Today, we’re introducing a new ingredient to this powerful mix: Heroku + AppLink.

OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, and Fir: Putting it All Together

Modern cloud-native architectures are composed of multiple microservices running across dynamic environments. Effectively diagnosing performance issues, bottlenecks, or failures requires comprehensive observability. For this, many organizations look to OpenTelemetry, which provides a standardized approach to capturing and analyzing telemetry data. Fir is Heroku’s next generation cloud platform , designed to offer more modern cloud-native capabilities with flexibility and scalability. It’s built on proven, open-source technologies. Traditional Heroku relied on proprietary technologies, which was appropriate at the time because high-quality open-source alternatives didn’t exist. But now, technologies like Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry are considered best-in-class solutions that are widely deployed and supported…

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