Heroku is a platform as a service (PaaS) that allows developers to build, run, and operate applications entirely in the cloud. With Heroku, developers can spend their time on their application code instead of managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling. The document provides an overview of cloud computing and Heroku's features which include easy deployment with Git, automatic scaling, comprehensive monitoring tools, and an intuitive dashboard. It also describes how to set up a Heroku account, understand key concepts like the Procfile and package.json, and deploy a sample Node.js application to Heroku with Git.