111–120 of 161 posts
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Acquisitions always ruin the thing being acquired.
Instagram seems ok.
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Exactly, it was a massive success. I never used Heroku but it was an great concept and a huge achievement. After an acquisition products normally fail as large companies are too sclerotic to adopt or even value new ways of working, so they just destroy what they don’t understand, often after paying a huge premium for it.
Not a "massive" success. At the time of the acquisition, its revenues were a few MM$. The acquisition price was high compared to what was happening at the time. And then, Salesforce didn't really know what to do with it, and growth slowed down and good leadership left.
I am myself maintaining a custom built webshop/ERP system for a local company that repairs smartphones. I barely find enough time to maintain the actual code. If I would have to dig through the weeds on AWS the project would definitely be dead right now. Instead I just "git push heroku main" and I am done. I can also provision a database or Redis through the UI, without having to worry that I made a mistake that could cost me thousands of Dollars.
Current paying Heroku customer, so... feels successful enough to me!
What I love about HN is the exposure to new ideas and suggestions. I've seen suggested here that fly.io is a cheaper alternative that people rave about. I had a quick look at their site and so far I like what I see.
So come Monday morning I'm going to add a ticket to the dev queue: Investigate moving from Heroku -> Fly.io
We'll look at the pros and cons. Pricing. Ease of use. etc. The usual. And my gut tells me that heroku might be losing yet one more customer and the tens of thousands per year that my company is currently spending with them. We're a small team, so it was decided to spend the money on a PaaS instead of a large ops team. It's worked well enough for the past 15 years. So maybe time to move?
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> Heroku inspired a lot including direct competitors (like Cloud Foundry). A lot of money has been made and people jobs make easier. Ah Cloud Foundry. Something I drink to forget. CF was the tool Salesforce should've bought or written. Heroku not so much.
Was it so bad? My experience with it was resoundingly positive, and saw lots of productivity gains with a great developer experience for teams that could build apps with strong guard rails in place. Now everyone and the kitchen sink „needs“ their own kubernetes cluster and operations teams struggle to build complex landing zones for the underlying cloud infrastructure so teams don’t shoot their own foot off all too e…
My recollections were that BOSH and CF exposed a ton more complexity than I wanted, and I don't remember there being a great story for deploying Rails apps. But all of these abstraction layers are just like cross-platform GUI toolkits – you're never going to approach the native look and feel or integration. And I don't like the terminology(!) it's all relatively unintuitive to me (e.g. stem cells, deployments, releases).
For contrast the Hashicorp stack for our AWS environments (tf+packer+vault) generally felt much more pleasant to deal with, and that's where the comparison to GUI toolkits falls apart I suppose.
But… look at all the integrations and enterprisey features that CF+BOSH offer. That's way more of the sort of thing that I'd expect to fit in at Salesforce.
I was a relatively early Heroku employee, though still technically started _after_ the acquisition. 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 pi…
People still use it as a benchmark. I see products marketed like "Heroku for mobile apps" and the like. It's the gold standard for PaaS even when it doesn't work.
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'…
I think pricing was a big issue with Heroku. You're not wrong that Heroku means you can get a lot out of a single employee. At the same time, I think that people can be "penny wise, pound foolish" and I think that people often have a sense of markup that feels unfair to them (even though they're often wildly off-base about what that markup is). Let's say that a product saves you 5 hours a week of developer time. If y…
Sure, it's a bit of a work, but the number of people who could set an ok server without paying that price is not low (also you'd be paying this for something that's almost a one-off work)
Are there any real alternatives to Heroku for small to medium sized projects? I am talking about projects with only one or two engineers. Those engineers likely focus on providing value for the customer by improving the actual product itself. Instead of taking care of deploying their project on AWS, which is quite complex, if you do not use it regularly. I am myself maintaining a custom built webshop/ERP system for a…
- fly.dev
I'm sure there's others, these are just the ones I happen to remember at the moment.
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> 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.
Since you seem to have some insight into this, I interviewed a former Heroku eng a while back and he said that they deploy Heroku infra on Heroku, essentially dogfooding their own product. I also see a lot of claims that Heroku has essentially stagnated on features. I'm curious how do internal teams reconcile this (do they just work around the stagnation?) and is there a layer that is a choke point for product improv…
The selling point was easy and reproducible deployment. But there are must cheaper alternatives, and dynos productivity didn't have enough benefits for the cost.