41–50 of 161 posts
It hasn't failed. I'm not sure the final outcome of the current debacle but there's still nothing that matches Heroku. I've been using it professionally for 6+ years now and it just works more than most other things I've used. It has its weird limitations but it's... Good. (And I've gone pretty deep into aspects of the buildpacks, how it stores its git repos on S3, and more.)
From my point of view, as a mere customer of their mass-market product (a.k.a. cedar) with some insight into operation history, I think expensive or at least detailed investment in refurbishing or adjusting the mass-market product became, for whatever reason, difficult to (internally) justify expense for.
For example: the mechanisms that make "heroku run" work could have really used a new version that could let me change my window size gracefully, and maybe streamlining some authentication, by using SSH. As far as I know, it's closely related to the first version of that feature ever written, which somewhat naively ties the client machine's tty to a remote tty via TLS connection. This is fine for getting cedar off the ground in the first release, but at some later year (decade?), it seems like it should have gotten re-do so, finally, I could change my terminal emulator window size.
Ditto the holding of extremely powerful API credentials in the plaintext file `~/.netrc`, further exacerbated by a fairly weak authorization system for Cedar. There's still a place for .netrc (e.g. so curl can pick up the credentials automatically), but at some point, use of the keyrings on various operating systems (at least) and U2F hardware attestation should have shown up.
Passing along cost reductions in inputs (e.g. AWS servers) is another long-standing example.
Somewhat related to that, IPv6 is a lot more common than it used to be. So are VPCs or similar products on other platforms. Putting all that behind a "let's have a call" process -- and cost structure -- for "Private Spaces" is not in step with the times in 2022. And probably not 2018, neither.
As a counter-example, it does seem the web/dashboard login not only grew U2F, but Macintosh TouchID support. Whoever got this in: well done. But it's a noteworthy exception. And I kind of wonder if it has anything to do with the web authentication system being more trouble than it's worth to segment between Cedar and the Private Spaces product.
There's always a temptation to put new features into an upmarket product to increase the gap in segmentation, but realizing that at least some features are closer to adaptations to raising or at least changing standards of adequacy in industry does not come naturally. I don't think this is the only problem, but it seems like a problem to me. As it comes to projects that turn on minute details, such as improving "heroku run" in the presence of terminal emulator resizing, it probably says something about the bureaucracy's inability to grapple with details of that kind. That was already present when I left.
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They have not pushed out any notable updates in a long time, bugs have remained unfixed for many years, customer support is unhelpful. All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left, the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce. It's a zombie of a company. The product and pricing are pretty good for small projects, but almost everyone outgrows Heroku well before they transition from "small" to "…
This is a bad take without much internal context. Heroku is not thriving as it stands today. It takes a lot just to run Heroku and the engineers still around care deeply around it. I'm excited for a lot of the new offerings like Fly and Railway, but they aren't operating at the same scale as Heroku. It does feel like there continues to be a fading at a leadership level about developer experience and what it means. Th…
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I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition
Isn't the elephant in the room then; why did Salesforce buy Heroku? I mean: > From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products > I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition
Isn't the elephant in the room then; why did Salesforce buy Heroku? I mean: > From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products > I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?
After Apex was introduced in 2006, Salesforce suffered criticism (misplaced, IMHO) over the fact that it was proprietary. In 2009 it did a partnership with VMware to create a Java-as-a-service proto-PaaS so business logic could be written in Java instead of Apex. This service (VMforce) never worked for a variety of reasons, leaving Salesforce to look for an alternative -- so in early 2011 they bought Heroku. Thats why the first thing Heroku did post acquisition was build Java support.
Turns out this wasn't a great product idea to start (the limitations of externalizing business logic, especially at that time, weren't worth the effort), so the strategic reason for the acquisition was no longer relevant. Years later there were successful integrations that had different value propositions, although those suffered from the constraints described above.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition
Isn't the elephant in the room then; why did Salesforce buy Heroku? I mean: > From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products > I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a bad take without much internal context. Heroku is not thriving as it stands today. It takes a lot just to run Heroku and the engineers still around care deeply around it. I'm excited for a lot of the new offerings like Fly and Railway, but they aren't operating at the same scale as Heroku. It does feel like there continues to be a fading at a leadership level about developer experience and what it means. Th…
For Fly.io I need to create a docker container? Why would I want to do that when I can just push to Heroku?
I've spent the much of the last 10 years hoping that I once again get to be part of such a failure. It's such a rare opportunity to work with an amazing team of talented people who set a new standard for what a great developer experience is, how simple it should be to run containerized workloads, that a robust build pipeline can actually be easy to use, setting the precedent for what a tightly integrated SaaS ecosystem/marketplace looks like, review apps, buildpacks... things that improved the lives for literally millions of developers. And even a decade later continue to set the bar for what many aspire to.
An amazing legacy to have a product that has been so relevant for so long in what is such a fast moving industry. I wish everyone got to be part of such a failure at least once in their careers. It's something I'll cherish for the rest of my days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have not pushed out any notable updates in a long time, bugs have remained unfixed for many years, customer support is unhelpful. All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left, the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce. It's a zombie of a company. The product and pricing are pretty good for small projects, but almost everyone outgrows Heroku well before they transition from "small" to "…
> the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce This is definitely false. Though some internal apps are deployed on Heroku, it is not the primary deployment target for new projects. Heroku staff work on Heroku. Salesforce has a large internal infra program and team that has no overlap with Heroku. past codename projects have been proposed to change this, but none have ever come to be.