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Why did Heroku fail?

matt-rickard.com

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Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#81

Post by pjot »

craigkerstiens wrote: post #20

As someone that put a good portion of their working career into helping create Heroku alongside many others, several who contributed way more and had a larger impact, the notion that it failed is probably the first thing that should be up for debate. But because we seem to want to debate this on a weekly basis... Heroku made reproducible builds and deployments a thing at a time people were used to ssh'ing in and scp'…

  Did we want to login to gus to open a support ticket on a VPN? No. Did we want to move into the SDFC offices that were cube farms vs. large ceilings with a lot of natural lighting?No. But could Salesforce help us make Heroku more available to customers and accelerate adoption? Sure.
Just want to say thank you for what y’all built.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#82

Post by glenngillen »

kdazzle wrote: post #77
craigkerstiens wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Salesforce created it was wrong. That Heroku was already that way, yes also re-painting history. Cedar and buildpacks were conceived before the acquisition but launched after. The teams were allowed to continue executing on roadmaps for multiple years after the acquisition, but Salesforce could be viewed more like a series b, c, d round than in a way influencing the roadmap and making it happen. GitHub is an ama…

> [Github A]ctions and much of the GitHub turn around happened long before the acquisition Interesting - someone at either MS or Github told me that the Azure DevOps team moved over to GitHub to create Actions. But maybe I misheard or both versions are true.

Here's what I think the two potential scenarios you map out are:

- That Jason Warner, Max Schoening, and a brains trust of Heroku Product & Design leadership jumped ship to GitHub. After they got there they continue their run of product success and innovation and launch the next platform innovation for GitHub. Which also just happens to be yet another way to run code as a service.

- The ADO team join GitHub, and then pivot into a whole new and foreign area.

People can make their own judgements on which of these is the most likely option.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#83

Post by nomilk »

> why haven't they figured out how to make it viable

Any data to support this? I suspect Heroku is immensely profitable on account of its huge user base (4th largest cloud provider after AWS, Azure, and GCP), and very healthy profit margins.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#84

Post by [deleted] »

hthrowaway5 wrote: post #68
ilaksh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's different. Heroku itself was a massive success. The Salesforce management completely screwed up the department after the acquisition. That's on Salesforce not Heroku. Heroku left the building already.

Agreed. Heroku was an incredible success but using it in 2022 would be downright negligence. (Although I would argue that Salesforce was also responsible for creating most of what we love about Heroku. That acquisition happened far earlier than people realize. They're also almost entirely responsible for its downfall.) EDIT: Craig is right below (and he pretty much always is). When I said "created" I really meant in…

[deleted]

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#85

Post by Scarbutt »

listenallyall wrote: post #80
bastawhiz wrote: post #5

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 "…

> Render, fly, even Netlify Pretty sure none of these can run any JVM applications. Heroku can, very easily.

They can, by using docker.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#87

Post by nomilk »

Reminds me of a Sam Altman quote about Airbnb:

> for all that people worry and for all that the press loves to say, 'Ah, this happened; this thing is over,' and whip themselves up in this frenzy, it never actually kills the startup. It's a problem; people love to talk about it. And there's this schadenfreude of loving to hate on someone's perceived missteps or someone's problem. So people love to talk about it. But then they go back and they book AirBnB for their next vacation.

Econtalk Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAYXUgNHHc4&t=16m25s

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#88

Post by jbm »

bastawhiz wrote: post #5
bko wrote: post #2

I read the article but I'm still confused by the premise. What does it mean that Heroku failed? They're still around although owned by Salesforce. Are there are metrics that they're not making money or have no/negative growth? What am I missing?

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 "…

> All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left

There are still plenty of talented engineers at Heroku.

I used to do architecture work and support for enterprise customers and I knew the whole support team. Heroku support engineers are all devs or former devs; I am surprised at how passionate they can be about their work (ex: Jason, who STILL keeps the subreddit updated in his spare time).

I do think there are situations where support can't help, but those are usually situations where Heroku is probably not the right place to host a service. They can't help you setup crypto miners on the platform, or to setup a redirect service. If you don't like how the platform works, they can drop in suggestions on what to change, but they aren't going to be able to implement them overnight. You might get ideas on restructuring your app to work better on Heroku, which I admit is quite frustrating for a customer; but limiting the problem domain is part of building a service like Heroku.

Heroku's support structure didn't have a half dozen escalations, which was good IMO.

If you run into an issue on the platform, there is usually the support engineer and then engineers who developed it. This might have changed around when I left (my team was mostly eliminated during the pandemic), so I'm not particularly up-to-date on recent changes. However, the system they had in place when I was there felt much better, as a developer who needs help, than the support I currently get from (large IAAS provider), despite myself doing work for a major customer of theirs.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#89

Post by jakear »

jolux wrote: post #47
dubswithus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can see this argument but at the same time Dockerfiles for my preferred framework (Phoenix) are more or less muscle memory for me at this point. The better question is: why don't frameworks come with a Dockerfile by default? The effort:reward ratio on containerization is huge, it gives you your app in a runnable, dependency-free format that you can build reliably and deploy on an extremely diverse set of platforms.

Dependency free? Isn’t Docker a dependency itself? And it’s the most annoying one — no other dependency constantly keeps a core going at 15% on my machine, or considers not upgrading a premium feature, or incessantly interrupts my work with NPS pop ups even when I’m doing nothing related to Docker.

If anyone at Docker is reading this, I mark “100% no” when you interrupt me with pop up asking if I’d recommend your product to a friend when I’m in the middle of working on something entirely unrelated to your product. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#90

Post by burnished »

sodality2 wrote: post #35
stevenharman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Is it a bad idea to post this under your full name? Edit: Above content was expletive-laden sentence against anyone who dares insult Heroku

>> All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left, >LOL… Fuck right the fuck off.

The quote that is no longer visible if you haven't turned on 'see dead posts' or whatever the setting is.

>Is it a bad idea to post this under your full name? From my perspective, no, it is not a bad idea. It is a pretty toothless sentence, it expresses displeasure but doesn't even go so far as to insult..

On the other hand, I'm a vulgar contrarian and would be unlikely to face any social censure for saying things like that, so of course it seems relatively reasonable to me. Are you in a social context such that if you felt insulted in public and answered similarly that you'd fear backlash?

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