Introducing the Heroku AI Platform as a Service (AI PaaS)

Today, we are pleased to announce the evolution of Heroku to an AI Platform as a Service (AI PaaS). GenAI has changed how we build software (vibe coding), the kind of technology we use (Cursor, LLMs), the type of software we make (agents), and redefined what it means to be a developer in this new world.

In a recent Salesforce study, 84% of developers with AI say it helps their teams complete their projects faster. AI-powered, natural language development tools make it possible for anyone to create software by typing instructions in English. This increase in new apps is only matched by the increasing complexity of new technology to choose from, integrate, and maintain as a stable and secure platform – stressing the existing delivery gaps and friction in software delivery.

Heroku was founded to make deploying and scaling Ruby on Rails apps in the cloud easy for developers. Over the last decade, we remained steadfast in this mission by expanding to support more languages, databases, and now to AI. The Heroku AI PaaS brings powerful AI primitives into our opinionated platform with a simplified developer experience and automated operations to accelerate delivery of AI-powered apps and agents.

The Heroku AI PaaS adds these new capabilities to our robust cloud-native platform foundation:

• Heroku AppLink: Enable Agentforce to more use cases with custom actions, channels, tools in any programming language and securely integrated with a single click through Salesforce Flows, Apex, and Data Cloud. Agentforce is the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform for deploying autonomous AI agents across any business function. This capability brings the ecosystem of programming languages and custom code to augment and enhance Salesforce implementations. AppLink will GA in July.
• AI-Native Tools Integration: Leverage tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and Claude Code to vibe code new apps, modernize existing apps, and add capabilities to agents. Deploy and manage code running on Heroku directly from these new developer tools. This capability is available today.
• MCP Server Toolkit: Enable your agents with more capabilities by exposing relevant tools and data with MCP Servers, a critical element of agentic workflows. Build and run custom MCP Servers, the official Heroku MCP Server, or the Heroku Remote MCP Server on Heroku and Heroku MCP Toolkits provide a unified gateway to deploy and manage multiple MCP servers on the platform. With Agentforce 3.0‘s native MCP support, bringing your Heroku Remote MCP Server to Agentforce is now a reality. MCP Server support is available today.
• Heroku Managed Inference and Agents: Brings together a set of powerful primitives into the platform that make it simple for developers to build, scale, and operate AI-powered features and applications, without the heavy lifting of managing their own AI infrastructure. Access to leading models from Claude, Cohere, Stability, and more; plus primitives for building agents that can reason, act, and call tools, developers can focus on delivering differentiated experiences for their users, rather than wrangling inference infrastructure or orchestration logic. Heroku Managed Inference and Agents is available today.

Plus these new AI apps and agents will benefit from Heroku’s built-in automation, autoscaling, observability, and dashboards for all workloads running on the platform, giving you peace of mind at any scale and the metrics to monitor ongoing performance.

Complementing the platform innovations are new additions to our partner program to increase the technical expertise available to our customers around the world that help deliver their new app projects faster and more successfully. New certifications deepen expertise in solution design and implementation while a new Heroku Expert Area in Partner Navigator makes it easy for customers to find the right partner for their needs. Learn more about the partner updates here.

Our focus has always been on the apps, the code that drives your business. The software being built today is agentic and these new apps and agents require access to data, tools, and other agents to get the job done. The Heroku AI PaaS brings powerful AI technology to your fingertips with ease of use in mind to help you deliver value to your business faster and with less complexity. Start exploring the new Heroku today.