Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why did Heroku fail?

matt-rickard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 161 posts

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#131

Post by tedmiston »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #110
grey-area wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Current revenue is not the right to focus on for an early stage acquisition.

They collectively raised $13M through the Series B in May 2010 and were acquired for $212M cash in December 2010 (technically ~$250M for the whole deal).

A ~16–19x return, especially that early, is pretty excellent.

That speaks to the product itself and its future growth potential and place in the market more than current revenue.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#132

Post by swat535 »

Scarbutt wrote: post #85
listenallyall wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They can, by using docker.

And yet, this is why Heroku is around. It is _still_ the easiest way to deploy your application to the cloud. Just do a git push and call it a day.. it has tons of integrations, can easily scale, has great backup and redundancy, integrated pipelines, review apps, great CLI..

People here underestimate the cost of wasting time setting up docker containers and fiddling with configuration files. Heroku is about delegating 90% of your Dev-Ops and actually focusing on your product and it pretty much works flawlessly with many stacks.

I looked at all the alternatives that people mentioned here and none of them hold a candle to Heroku (yes, even in its current degrading state). Perhaps eventually they will, but so far, I am not impressed.

Now if you excuse me, I have a product to build :)

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#133

Post by hthrowaway5 »

throwaway427 wrote: post #21
throwawaysfdc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Most of their attrition is due to the slow rate of product improvements. So yeah, it's demoralizing for sure.

I've heard this as a reason for leaving for almost a decade though so it hasn't been a new problem but it seems to get worse every year.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#134

Post by hthrowaway5 »

jbm wrote: post #88
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 "…

> 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 si…

You support folks were absolutely stellar. Great at working with customers but also adept at coding enough to resolve an incredible amount of customer problems.

If anyone is ever in a position to hire support staff and you see "Heroku" on the resume, definitely consider that a strong positive signal.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#136

Post by hthrowaway5 »

krajzeg wrote: post #124

This title seems very premature, and the article itself doesn't justify it well. While there are reasons to not use Heroku (pricing, the security debacle) and be annoyed with them, I don't see any signs of them losing their position in their sector of the market yet. They are still the go-to if you're in the "small-size project, don't want hassle, set up everything for me please" space. They might lose that position…

The only way they're going to succeed is if sfdc quadruples (or more) their headcount. We were struggling with product development and maintenance with the skeleton crew we had back in 2015 and probably had 3x as many people then.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#137

Post by hthrowaway5 »

mdasen wrote: post #101
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'…

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…

You may not have been happy with pricing but it really wasn't our reason for failing. We made plenty of money, see our former CEO's comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373300

I bet if we had 10x the revenue we still might've had the same outcome. When you're a relatively small part of a big corporation standard capitalism rules don't really apply.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#138

Post by dubswithus »

eastbound wrote: post #106
dubswithus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I like simpler. Most of my coworkers do not prefer simpler. They want to use tons of AWS services.

Resume-Based Development. My employees are the same. They want to tick all new tech boxes with our product, and they’re right, because they exit with 35% higher pay elsewhere (and I clearly don’t underpay them - this market seems to have no upward limit, and the only thing I’d like from them is taking ownership and responsibility, and it’s not happening).

> Resume-Based Development.

Love this! Had not heard it before.

I've also noticed a trend of coworkers wanting to add a lot more servers than we need for capacity and redundancy. As in they don't even look at New Relic. Reality is most of the bottleneck is database or the code needs to be refactored. Code written for a few thousand records is often not going to work when there are millions of records.

Another argument is moving parts of the monolith to a microservice because that would take load off the server.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#139

Post by sfc32 »

Who said it failed?

Heroku might be a bit long in the tooth, but has a solid company behind it and it a lot easier than fooling around with Capistrano, Ansible or heaven-help-us Kubernetes.

Trust me, I've tried them all, and for a fairly standard Rails app Heroku just works.

The lack of HTTP2 is a bit embarrassing though.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#140

Post by dubswithus »

jolux wrote: post #94
jakear wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

Docker Desktop is a development dependency, but you can also use Podman or minikube. I just use Podman these days, I prefer it. The container format is all standard these days, you don’t actually need anything Docker to use it. Fargate and Fly don’t even actually run the container directly, they convert it to a VM with Firecracker first.

Running containers make me feel like I need production hardware on my development machine. It's slow, clunky, and uses too much memory. I'd rather boot it up without docker.
Post reply on HN