1 Reason DigitalOcean's Growth Could Accelerate -- and It's Thanks to Salesforce

2026-02-18 06:50:00 ET

Heroku, which was acquired by Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) in 2011, was one of the original platform-as-a-service providers. A PaaS platform like Heroku lets developers develop, deploy, and manage apps without having to fiddle with the underlying infrastructure. PaaS platforms are a dime a dozen today, but Heroku is still a major player. Gartner recently named Heroku a leader among cloud-native application platforms for 2025.

Despite that leadership position, Salesforce is pivoting away from Heroku. In an announcement on Feb. 6, the company disclosed that Heroku would adopt a "sustaining engineering model." The platform will be actively supported, but there will be no new features, and new customers won't be eligible for Enterprise Account contracts.

Heroku isn't exactly dead, but it may as well be. Any company running production applications, particularly mission-critical workloads, are almost certainly going to be heading to the exits eventually.

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