October 2026 Update: Heroku Innovations and New Features

Heroku’s continuous platform innovation keeps operational overhead out of your path while delivering our industry-best developer experience. We handle everything below your code, from the core infrastructure and OS maintenance to runtimes and dependencies, so developers can stay focused on building.

You can see that ongoing innovation across our latest releases in managed data services, platform access controls, and Salesforce connectivity.

Modernized data and platform infrastructure

Running production applications requires reliable databases and predictable platform performance. Recent updates across our data platform and build tooling give developers greater control as workloads scale.

Heroku Postgres Advanced, available to all teams this week, is our new managed database tier offering dedicated instance pools for workload isolation, decoupled storage and compute scaling, and higher throughput. Built on entirely new infrastructure, it handles everything from everyday web services to high-throughput production systems.

Additional platform features delivered recently:

• Support for Cloud Native Buildpacks on Cedar-generation apps lets teams modernize build pipelines without code rewrites.
• Heroku Postgres now defaults to Postgres 18 across all database tiers, bringing query optimizations and security patches.
• Fir Private Spaces default to x86_64 architecture for improved binary compatibility and compute execution.

Enterprise security and access management

Managing application environments across growing engineering teams requires precise permissions and secure credential handling. We shipped new capabilities and controls to simplify access management and protect deployment pipelines:

• Fine-grained access controls provide scoped permission management at the application, pipeline, and data resource level.
• Team Authorizations provide team-owned API tokens and OAuth credentials for CI/CD pipelines and API integrations, replacing individual user tokens in automated workflows.
• Native keychain storage support secures Heroku CLI credentials using OS-native secure storage tools.

Deepened Salesforce and ecosystem connectivity

We simplified how engineering teams connect Heroku services to Salesforce workflows, making enterprise integrations easier to manage and maintain.

• Direct Salesforce API version control in Heroku Connect lets teams manage and test API upgrades on their own schedule.
• AppLink dashboard updates simplify connection management with real-time status tracking, JWT-based authorization, and single-click External Services publishing to Salesforce Flows and Agentforce.

Looking ahead

Continuous innovation is essential as developer workflows and application architectures evolve. Whether upgrading managed databases, enforcing access policies, or connecting services to Salesforce, our goal remains keeping infrastructure complexity off your plate so you can focus on building.

We have a lot of great updates coming later this year as we continue to evolve the platform to meet the growing needs of the Salesforce ecosystem and citizen developers. Join us November 10-12 at KubeCon in Salt Lake City to learn more about our new platform capabilities and connect with our team.