Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages. One of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now supports Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go. For this reason, Heroku is said to be a polyglot platform as it has features for a developer to build, run and scale applications in a similar manner across most languages. Heroku was acquired by Salesforce in 2010 for $212 million.
Heroku was initially developed by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry for supporting projects that were compatible with the Ruby programming platform known as Rack. The prototype development took around six months. Later on, Heroku faced setbacks because of lack of proper market customers as many app developers used their own tools and environment. In January 2009, a new platform was launched which was built almost from scratch after a three-month effort. In October 2009, Byron Sebastian joined Heroku as CEO. On December 8, 2010, Salesforce.com acquired Heroku as a wholly owned subsidiary of Salesforce.com. On July 12, 2011, Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, the chief designer of the Ruby programming language, joined the company as Chief Architect, Ruby. That same month, Heroku added support for Node.js and Clojure. On September 15, 2011, Heroku and Facebook introduced Heroku for Facebook. At present Heroku supports Redis databases in addition to its standard PostgreSQL.
On April 7, 2022, Heroku suffered a significant security intrusion attackers were able to obtain an access token for a Heroku account that was used for automation purposes. Heroku confirmed that the attack accessed OAuth bearer tokens used for integration with GitHub and salted and hashed customer passwords in May 2022. The OAuth2 tokens were then used in targeted attacks against an unknown set of GitHub repositories to attempt to find secret tokens it appears, where npm was the primary repository GitHub identified as a target.