Salesforce just gave its developers a lot more control

Salesforce's Heroku platform isn't as well-known as its other products, like the CRM platform that made it famous.

But plenty of customers, including Macy's, Dollar General, and Soylent, rely on Heroku as the backbone that helps them write and deliver mobile and web apps to a huge-and-growing audience from the cloud.

At today's Dreamforce event, Heroku got some love with the launch of Heroku Private Spaces, a new product in public beta that gives developers a lot more control over their applications.

Today, when you use Heroku - or competitors like Red Hat OpenShift and Microsoft Azure - your apps run using a tiny sliver of the computing power in a massive data center. In other words, your app is running on the same servers and storage hardware as everybody else's.

This is fine and dandy for your average startup. But for big enterprise customers, where total control over your data is often an absolute must-have, this can be a real dealbreaker.

Enter Heroku Private Spaces, which lets you take the whole Heroku product, including all of its tools and components for helping developers rapidly build their applications, and drop it into a totally sequestered part of the data center, isolated from the rest of the network.

Better yet, Heroku Private Spaces lets developers choose the geographic region they want their application to run from, including data center facilities across the United States, in Germany (a big help for EU-based companies, who have even more stringent data residency requirements), and an apparently much-requested Japan option.

By choosing where to put Heroku, and ensuring it stays separate from everybody else, it makes it a lot more private - and, hopefully, a lot more appealing to the IT department at even the biggest corporate prospects.