By Trevor Hill,

The Storj team has expanded the beta-testing of its platform by implementing theHeroku cloud Platform-as-a-Service. The team announced the news on their official blog on October 26th, 2016.

 Storj to Beta Test with Heroku

Specifically, Storj will test its service on Heroku’s Element Marketplace as an add-on. This is the cloud service’s online market that offers developers premade add-ons and other technical solutions.

Storj’s official blog refers to Heroku as one of the largest developer ecosystems in the world. Moreover, It lets app developers spend their time on application code, instead of managing server infrastructure.

The team is also looking for beta-testers for the Heroku platform, saying those who participate will gain access to Storj’s object store with just 1 click.

Additionally, during this period of beta testing, Storj will offer its services for free — just like the standalone version.

The Heroku announcement comes as part of Storj Lab’s testing efforts, which it began with a public beta release of the Storj platform earlier this year. Around the same time, it also began a partnership with Microsoft Azure.

Their Microsoft Azure deal became possible when the team behind Augur connected Storj developers with Microsoft’s Blockchain-as-a-Service product.

When Bitcoin.com spoke with Storj Labs CEO, Shawn Wilkinson, about the matter earlier this year, he had this to say:

“We were connected by the Augur guys, who highly recommend Microsoft Azure BaaS, and said it was a really easy process. We already have a couple enterprises that we are currently working closely with right now and focusing our attention on. We see Azure as a playground for any enterprises to try us out, before really getting involved with us.”

Storj Team Hopes Vision Becomes Reality

Additionally, this summer Storj also partnered with the decentralized financial application platform Counterparty. Its aim is to help create instant, off-chain micropayment channels.

Storj has been one of the of the more anticipated applications of so-called “blockchain 2.0 technology” over the last 2 years.

It had a successful crowd sale in 2014, raising 910 BTC (worth almost $650,000 at press time). Now, the team’s activity this year suggests that they are ready to move forward with their vision of a fully functioning P2P cloud storage platform.

To make their vision a reality, there’s also a few goals the team hopes to accomplish with Storj:

•  Developers build apps using Storj as the data layer.
• Connect the apps on a marketplace, with users in control.
• Use cryptocurrency to create a self-sustaining ecosystem with market efficiencies.
• Transition to a fully automated and trustless system, which will form the base layer for IoT and decentralized autonomous organizations.
• Activate a friendlier version of Skynet.