Salesforce is making a significant change to its long-standing cloud platform, Heroku. The company has stopped selling new Heroku Enterprise contracts and shifted the platform into a maintenance-only phase focused on stability and support. This move hints that Heroku might be nearing the end of its lifecycle as Salesforce reorients its strategy toward other areas like artificial intelligence.

Heroku’s Transition to Sustaining Engineering

According to Nitin T Bhat, Heroku’s chief product officer, the platform is now in a “sustaining engineering” phase. This means the focus is no longer on developing new features but on maintaining security, stability, and reliability. Salesforce will no longer offer new Enterprise Account contracts to attract fresh customers, signaling a slowdown in platform growth.

Industry analysts see this shift as a sign that Heroku’s days as a thriving platform may be limited. Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, explained that sustaining engineering is often a holding pattern. It allows the parent company to delay a full shutdown, but it also indicates that the platform’s relevance is waning. When platforms enter this phase, efforts to innovate decline, and the platform often loses importance for developers and partners.

Historical Precedents of Managed Decline

Experts point out that Heroku’s current status is similar to other tech products that slowly fade away. Pareekh Jain, principal analyst at Pareekh Consulting, mentioned examples like IBM’s Bluemix, which was phased into maintenance mode before being absorbed into Red Hat OpenShift. VMware’s Pivotal Cloud Foundry was also transitioned into sustain mode before its features were integrated into Tanzu. Google’s App Engine, Microsoft Silverlight, Oracle Solaris, Atlassian’s Fisheye, and Adobe’s Flash all experienced similar declines, eventually being retired or left behind as companies shifted focus.

These cases show that once a platform enters a sustaining phase, it rarely makes a comeback. Instead, it slowly becomes obsolete as companies prioritize newer technologies and strategic goals. This pattern suggests that Salesforce’s move to sustain Heroku may be a prelude to its eventual phase-out.

Why Heroku Is Losing Relevance

Heroku’s struggles stem from its inability to keep pace with the evolving cloud landscape. Two main challenges stand out. First, competitors like Render, Railway, Fly.io, Vercel, and Supabase now offer more flexible, cost-effective solutions that better suit modern development needs. These platforms are often easier to use and more modular, making them attractive for developers looking for quick and affordable options.

Second, the underlying database ecosystem has expanded significantly. Hosted Postgres and other specialized backend services now provide many alternatives to Heroku’s integrated stack. This reduces the platform’s unique appeal and makes it less competitive. Rising costs and declining innovation further diminish Heroku’s relevance, leading to a strategic shift by Salesforce.

Overall, the combination of increased competition, technological shifts, and strategic refocusing suggests that Heroku’s role within Salesforce may be coming to an end. While it still serves existing customers, new investments and developments are unlikely, pointing toward a slow phase-out in the future.

Inspired by

• https://www.infoworld.com/article/4129430/salesforce-may-be-prepping-to-phase-out-heroku.html

Sources

• heroku.com
• cio.com
• greyhoundresearch.com
• pareekh.com
• avasant.com