In an exclusive pre-KubeCon interview, Heroku CMO Betty Junod shares insights into how the Salesforce-owned platform-as-a-service pioneer continues to shape the cloud native landscape.

As one of the early innovators that helped define developer experience in the cloud, Heroku is now setting its sights on deeper Kubernetes integration and a community-driven update to the influential 12-factor application methodology.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024, the company plans to showcase its evolving platform capabilities, including new developments in Cloud Native Buildpacks and Open Telemetry, while reflecting on a decade of container-driven transformation in application development.

VMblog:  If you were giving a KubeCon attendee a quick overview of the company, what would you say?  How would you describe the company?

Betty Junod:  Heroku (a Salesforce company), is an application platform that helps teams build, deploy, and scale their apps securely and effortlessly in the cloud. Heroku pioneered the Platform-as-Service category in the early 2000's and has defined for the industry, what a great developer experience looks like. Heroku brings together all of the platform categories of IaaS, DevOps, and IDP into a unified experience for both Dev and Ops, so that teams have more time to focus on what's important - the apps.

VMblog:  Your company is sponsoring this year's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.  Can you talk about what that sponsorship looks like, how attendees can find you, and what else your company is hosting?

Junod:  This KubeCon we are sponsoring both KubeCon, AppDevCon, and the Executive Summit. Our booth number is N-11 and we'll have lots of demos and swag to share. We have a number of talks including at AppDevCon and breakout sessions on Cloud Native Buildpacks and Open Telemetry. Additionally, we are co-hosting a happy hour with AWS on Wednesday night. You can learn more and register here.

VMblog:  What do you attribute to the success and growth of this cloud native industry?

Junod:  Having been part of this ecosystem since 2014, we saw containers do to apps, what virtual machines did to servers. At that time, concepts like Agile, DevOps, and Microservices were starting to gain traction as more teams were interested in shipping faster and delivering apps at internet scale. To do that, teams needed different technology. Containers made a developer's life easier - it removed a lot of the infrastructure and dependency headaches. The developer demand is what pushed the ecosystem ahead. As millions of developers started building with containers,  everyone else needed to figure out how to connect, deploy, orchestrate, manage, secure containers...and so much more. At its core, this movement has been driven by the apps and the people that create them. It's been amazing to see the technology innovation, the end user adoption, definition of industry standards, and overall growth in the community and ecosystem over the past decade.

VMblog:  What are you personally most interested in seeing or learning at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon?

Junod:  I am most interested in hearing about two things; what end users are doing and what are the new open source projects. Over the years it's been great to hear about the advanced use cases from some of the end users as Kubernetes has matured. And at the same time, it's great to see a large number of the attendees being first timers and to talk to them about their experiences. I missed the last couple of KubeCons so I am looking forward to catching up with everyone.

VMblog:  Can you double click on your company's technologies?  And talk about the types of problems you solve for a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendee. What sets you apart from the competition?

Junod:  Heroku is an application platform in the Platform-as-a-Service category. From a technology perspective, this means that we are bringing together developer tools, infrastructure services, container orchestration, DevOps tooling, monitoring and metrics, and more into one platform experience. That means Heroku manages the lifecycle of each of the individual technologies and integrates them together in a way that builds in best practices we believe are key to building and running apps well. These best practices are built into the platform and automated to help streamline the operational overhead needed and improve the developer experience.

Heroku cares deeply about the developer experience and focuses on meeting developers where they are. This means supporting the languages and tools they prefer including Java, Go, Node.js, Ruby, Python, Scala, PHP, Scala, and Clojure; making it easy to add data services and other app elements from a marketplace of popular technologies; to having developer-friendly app metrics and insights readily available.

For the operator/platform engineer, Heroku is focused on helping your teams scale. Platforms have many components and that can add to complexity. The Heroku provides an integrated experience to alleviate the burdens of choosing individual components, integrating them, lifecycle management, and security so teams can direct their resources to proactive work that improves app performance and resiliency.

From a KubeCon/CloudNativeCon perspective, Heroku has championed Cloud Native Buildpacks since the beginning and we've been working more closely with Kubernetes and Open Telemetry...more to come on that soon.

VMblog:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is typically a great venue for a company to launch a new product or an update to an existing product.  Will your company be announcing anything new?  If so, can you give us a sneak preview?

Junod:  As mentioned in the earlier answer, we'll have more to share soon on our work with Kubernetes, Open Telemetry, and more. In addition, we've recently opened up a call for participation for the 12-factor manifesto. This is something that was written by Heroku founder Adam Wiggins over a decade ago on how to build and run apps for the web. Since then there has both been a lot of change in the technology ecosystem and we have also affirmed what the important principles and architectures are. We're looking forward to expanding the discussion and participation during KubeCon.

VMblog:  Do you have any advice for attendees of the show?

Junod:  Plan ahead! This conference has grown so much in the past 10 years from the number of attendees, to content tracks, and programming. I suggest checking out the schedule in advance and building yourself a list of "must attend" talks or workshops that align to your interests and goals; make a list of vendors you want to get demos from with questions you want to ask; and lastly a list of people you want to meet. It's easy to get distracted so go in with a plan - and make sure to visit the Heroku booth (we're the ones in purple).

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