Heroku's Betty Junod on AI-Powered Development & Heroku Vibes ahead of KubeCon NA 2025 | VMblog QA

Heroku Unveils AI-Powered "Vibes" Platform: Turning Ideas into Production Apps in Minutes

Ahead of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta, VMblog sat down with Betty Junod, CMO and SVP at Heroku, to discuss how AI is fundamentally transforming application development and who gets to be a "builder" in today's cloud-native landscape.

The Evolution of Platform-as-a-Service
As part of the Salesforce family, Heroku serves as an AI Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) designed to eliminate friction in the software delivery lifecycle. Junod explains that while the CNCF cloud-native landscape requires organizations to integrate potentially hundreds of components before running a single workload, Heroku handles the heavy lifting of infrastructure, security, and lifecycle management.

Introducing Heroku Vibes: AI-Powered Collaborative Development
The star of this interview is Heroku Vibes, recently released in pilot. This innovative platform enables "vibe coding" – where users describe what they want to build in natural language, and AI generates the code, provisions infrastructure, and deploys applications automatically. Junod notes this democratizes development beyond traditional coders to include product managers, technical program managers, and anyone with an idea they want to bring to life.

Real-World Impact
Junod shares compelling customer examples, including Health Sherpa (which manages Affordable Care Act open enrollment for millions of Americans) and Vesmark (building compliant financial services solutions). These organizations leverage Heroku's autoscaling capabilities and pre-configured compliant environments to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management.

The Road Ahead
Heroku's roadmap focuses on three key areas:

Expanding support for AI frameworks and models
Deepening integrations with Salesforce products
Continuing evolution of the Kubernetes-based cloud-native platform

The company supports nine programming languages (Node.js, Python, Java, .NET, Ruby, Go, PHP, Scala, and Clojure) and offers a growing catalog of third-party add-ons.

Visit Heroku at KubeCon
Stop by booth 305 to see live demos of Heroku Vibes and explore hands-on how the platform turns ideas into enterprise-grade applications. Can't make it to Atlanta? Visit vibes.heroku.com to try the platform yourself.

As Junod emphasizes, Heroku's vision remains constant: making difficult things simple while empowering builders to create and run great applications without the operational overhead.