As the cloud-native landscape grows increasingly complex with new tools and projects launching weekly, platform-as-a-service providers are racing to simplify the developer experience while integrating cutting-edge AI capabilities. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, Heroku is positioning itself as the AI Platform as a Service that removes infrastructure complexity and enables organizations to rapidly move from concept to production. The company is showcasing several major platform enhancements, including a next-generation Advanced Tier for Heroku Postgres, expanded Salesforce integration capabilities, and Heroku Vibes�an innovative collaborative agent that transforms ideas into deployed applications through conversational AI.
Betty Junod, CMO and SVP of Heroku sat down with VMblog to discuss how the company is addressing the fundamental challenge facing development teams today: navigating an overwhelming ecosystem of cloud-native technologies while maintaining focus on differentiated business value. In this exclusive Q&A, Junod reveals how Heroku’s integrated, opinionated approach delivers measurable outcomes for CTOs and CIOs�from reduced time to market to improved developer productivity�while the platform evolves to support the emerging reality of interactive, agentic applications. Attendees can experience these innovations firsthand at Booth 305, test their luck at Heroku’s claw machine, attend technical sessions on buildpacks and coding agents, and join an exclusive evening social co-hosted with AWS at the Glenn Hotel’s SkyLounge.
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VMblog: Can you give us your elevator pitch? What key message will attendees hear from you at KubeCon NA 2025, and what actionable insights will they take back to influence their management teams?
Betty Junod: Heroku is the AI Platform as a Service (PaaS) that enables organizations to quickly and seamlessly go from idea to live. Our focus has always been to help developers spend more time writing code and building apps, using integration and automation to remove as much friction as possible in the software delivery lifecycle and invisibly shift the important things left.
Heroku is about removing complexity and providing easy-to-use interfaces without sacrificing functionality. We do the heavy lifting, bringing the infrastructure plumbing and powerful technologies together into a platform experience with best practices built in and automated. The technology landscape will continue to grow in capabilities and complexity-our role is to make that landscape easy to navigate so that customers can achieve better outcomes faster.
VMblog: Where can attendees find you at the event? What hands-on demos, interactive experiences, or booth activities have you designed to showcase your technology?
Junod: You can find us at Booth 305 on the show floor. We are proud to support this community of technologists and open source projects with our CNCF membership and conference sponsorship. We have some great demos to show you the platform end to end, plus some new AI-powered capabilities. As for swag…this time we’re going to make you work for it! We’re bringing our Heroku claw machine game out for a chance to grab plushies, hats, or t-shirts. If you want more details, everything is on our event page.
VMblog: Can you dive deeper into your company’s core technologies? What specific challenges do you solve for KubeCon attendees in their day-to-day operations?
Junod: As a platform as a service, we deliver an entire, integrated application platform as a single service. The challenge facing many teams today is the complexity of the cloud native landscape. There are simply too many pieces of the puzzle to make sense of, select, integrate, and manage before a single workload can be deployed. What we offer is an integrated experience. Heroku brings together developer tools, build pipelines, CI/CD, infrastructure, AI services, observability, and more into a unified experience. We strive to lower the burden of undifferentiated heavy lifting in day-to-day operations so that teams can spend more time focusing on delivering apps that serve their employees and customers.
VMblog: In an increasingly saturated cloud-native marketplace, what distinguishes your solution in late 2025? What’s your unique value proposition?
Junod: There are a lot of technologies out there with new projects and tools releasing every week. What distinguishes Heroku from the pack is our platform point of view. We have always taken an integrated and opinionated approach to deliver a great developer experience that reduces cognitive load, removes friction, and is simple yet powerful.
VMblog: With GenAI workloads and LLM deployments reshaping cloud-native architectures, how does your solution address these AI infrastructure demands?
Junod: AI has fundamentally disrupted every layer of the stack, every stage of the software delivery lifecycle, and the types of apps we are now building. Heroku’s position remains the same: provide a platform-centric approach, simplified developer experience, and access to powerful AI models and tools like MCP server to quickly and effortlessly build and run AI or agentic apps. What we’ve done is add a number of AI services directly to the Heroku platform and expand our support for AI frameworks and developer tools like new IDEs. We’re quickly heading towards a reality where consumers expect that the apps they use to connect with businesses will be interactive and agentic, so the platform we provide app builders needs to have AI natively available versus being separate, bolted-on tooling.
VMblog: What’s your executive pitch for CTOs and CIOs? How do you demonstrate measurable business impact and ROI?
Junod: Heroku is the platform that transforms your team’s ability to deliver business value. Visionary engineering teams and business leaders recognize that their value line is in delivering what is differentiated and unique compared to their competitors: the products and experiences to attract new customers, engage and retain existing customers, and technology solutions that improve their internal operations.
CIOs and CTOs need to define where the value line is within their organization. For most teams and apps, building infrastructure won’t be differentiated. Going to managed services is the first consideration, but ask yourself how differentiated is your use of the different services and the integrations between them? Where else can that time and expertise add more value?
Our customer CxOs value metrics like time to market, delivery times, operational costs and overhead, mean time to repair, customer satisfaction, revenue growth, and employee productivity as outcomes delivered by Heroku’s AI PaaS.
Here’s what some of our customers have to say:
Complexity cannot be destroyed, only moved. The question becomes: �Where will it exist in your stack?’ What I like about Heroku is that while there’s a ton of complexity, I don’t have to think about it. We moved the complexity to where Heroku could deal with it so we could focus on solving problems for customers.
– Freedom Dumlao, Vestmark CTO
I don’t want to build infrastructure on AWS; I don’t have time. That’s the main reason we use Heroku-you don’t have to worry about all the infrastructure stuff.
– Cheyne Pierce, 1West CTO
VMblog: Is your company presenting any sessions, workshops, or contributing to the event programming?
Junod: Yes! Our engineers are speaking on a range of topics at KubeCon in the following sessions:
Project Lightning Talk: Container Builds At Scale With Buildpacks (Monday, November 10, 3:35 PM – 3:40 PM).
Maintain Track Talk: Using Buildpacks To Boost Developer Productivity (Tuesday, November 11, 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM).
Workshop: Coding Agents Are The Only Agent Framework You Need (Wednesday, November 12, 2:45 PM – 3:05 PM).
VMblog: Are you hosting any exclusive events, networking sessions, or after-hours meetups during KubeCon? How can attendees participate?
Junod: There are so many great opportunities to meet people at KubeCon, but the one I’m most excited about is the one we’re hosting! Our evening social, co-hosted with AWS, will be on Wednesday, 6-9pm ET at the Glenn Hotel’s SkyLounge. It’s going to be a great way to relax and network with us and other industry colleagues over drinks and appetizers. It’s invite-only, so be sure to register!
VMblog: Are you unveiling any new products, features, or partnerships at KubeCon NA?
Junod: We have a number of new enhancements to the Heroku platform, from our data services to AI and our integrations with our sister products in the Salesforce portfolio. As an AI PaaS, we design our platform to run a wide range of workloads, including complete applications, databases, or providing services that are part of a larger solution architecture.
Next Generation of Heroku Postgres brings forward a new Advanced Tier that provides a data service that is high-scale, performant, and flexible, with new functionality that enables non-disruptive operations like scaling of replicas without disrupting running applications. Join the pilot today.
Expanding Capabilities of Every Salesforce Org: Heroku gives developers the flexibility and performance to customize and extend Salesforce apps for Sales, Marketing, Data360, Agentforce, and more. By tapping into the broader ecosystem and high-performance compute, teams can implement custom logic tailored to their use cases. Recent Heroku AppLink and Connect enhancements dramatically expand the number of supported data objects, auth options, and enterprise scale, making Heroku an even more powerful platform for building integrated, responsive solutions.
Heroku Vibes, available in pilot, is a collaborative agent that turns your ideas into running apps in minutes. This AI-powered experience makes creating full web apps as easy as sending a text message. Heroku takes your instructions and creates a project plan, provisions infrastructure and a database, and then deploys the application. Sign up to try the pilot.
VMblog: What creative booth experiences, prize draws, or community engagement activities have you planned to connect with attendees?
Junod: We have a claw machine for you to try your hand at grabbing a prize! Additionally, we are hosting a daily sweepstakes for a chance to win special LEGO sets like the Imperial Star Destroyer, Hogwarts Castle and Grounds, and McLaren MP4/4 & Ayrton Senna. For those who are new to cloud native, we’re excited to support a special project with LearnKube/KubeFM called “Kubernetes World: Finding Your Path,” featuring interviews from many of the pioneers and community leaders within cloud native to help those new to the community navigate their journey.
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