Greg Nokes worked at Heroku right after it was acquired by Salesforce in December of 2010. He's joined in conversation by Chris De Gour, a Master Technical Architect at Salesforce, who has been working there since the acquisition. It's hard to imagine now, but when Salesforce and Heroku were both starting out, each company was introducing a radically different paradigm in how developers thought about their work. For Salesforce, it was about encouraging enterprise developers to embrace the Internet, and not need to worry about managing complex data schemes. For Heroku, they sought to make it as easy as possible to deploy applications, abstracting away the infrastructure and operations requirements. Salesforce was interested in Heroku precisely because they shared the same belief: that developers should concentrate on writing software, and leave the lower tier concerns to someone else.

Now, the conversation has shifted. Companies who use Salesforce might not know how Heroku can help them. They've accumulated all of this data, about their customers or their business, and Heroku can provide them with an easy way to gain insights about that data. Perhaps they want to set up a workflow to pass sensitive information to other people. Salesforce can provide an SSO login system, sharing rules for the data, and other business logic; a simple app built in any mainstream language can run on Heroku to ingest that data.

Greg and Chris both understand how levels of abstraction that cloud services provide can be perceived as "dangerous" models in several ways. By offloading concerns to other platforms, developers sometimes feel like they're not "really" developing; worse, they might believe that if they're not in total control of every aspect of the application, they'll eventually run into shortcomings. These fears are valid, but the industry as a whole has been embracing cloud services more and more as organizations realize that they can be most efficient when they focus on what matters to their core business.

Links from this episode

• Trailhead is an online platform offering a variety of developer curriculums