Heroku's strategy is about locking you in through services. It's the same playbook being followed by AWS, Azure and GCP. The concept of spinning up and scheduling containers is now well below the value line -- there are many competing platforms in this space. Raw compute is nearly a fungible, undifferentiated product at this point.

Insofar as you can decouple yourself from Heroku service offerings, you are able to decouple from Heroku.

Whether that's a full-service standalone platform like Cloud Foundry (partly inspired by, and partly sharing code with, Heroku), an IaaS-smoothing platform like Convox (founded by Heroku alumni), integrating some intermediate platforms like Deis or rolling your own with Kubernetes or Marathon.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which sells a commercial distribution of Cloud Foundry. And I work in the Cloud R&D section on opensource bits of it. So I have a horse in this race.