• Heroku’s Next Chapter Is Maintenance. • Yours Shouldn’t Be ByWade Wegner Chief Ecosystem and Growth Officer Published:February 9, 2026 5 min read Heroku’s move to a “sustaining engineering” model was carefully worded. • It avoids the term end-of-life. • It reassures existing customers that nothing changes immediately. • It emphasizes stability and support. • But if you read between the lines, the message is clear: there is no forward roadmap.
Article Summaries:
- Heroku has announced a shift to a “sustaining engineering” model, effectively moving the platform into maintenance mode with no new feature roadmap. The change reassures customers that services will remain available, but signals that innovation and platform updates will stop. As a result, many teams are reassessing their use of Heroku, noting that operational portability-data migration, networking, and deployment workflows-will require planning. Competitors, notably DigitalOcean’s App Platform, are positioning themselves to capture Heroku users, offering migration tools that map Heroku concepts to a similar build‑pack‑based architecture. DigitalOcean emphasizes that its platform supports future development, including native Bun runtime support, and provides detailed migration guides to ease the transition.
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