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Why did Heroku fail?

matt-rickard.com

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Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#141

Post by bastawhiz »

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…

> 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.

This hasn't been my experience at all. Mysterious performance issues are met with "We can't help, just install NewRelic" (the issues don't exist when running the same code on other services). Billing questions have yielded delayed and cryptic responses. Table stakes customer support simply isn't being addressed. And I don't blame the support agents, I just don't think they have the tools or resources to help.

By comparison, AWS has managed to answer almost all of my questions within one or two messages. Hell, even Amazon has admitted when there's a bug on their end. That simply doesn't happen at heroku anymore.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#142

Post by bastawhiz »

craigkerstiens wrote: post #31
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 "…

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…

> but they aren't operating at the same scale as Heroku.

As someone who said "I'm sure it can't get any worse" with heroku for many years and was proven wrong over and over, I genuinely don't know what you mean by this. Lots of stuff just doesn't work. Updated buildpacks don't get released on a useful timescale ("just make your own" isn't an answer). The platform is plagued by bizarre performance issues and noisy neighbors, and the pricing doesn't support it. In my time on Heroku, I couldn't break three nines of uptime one year entirely because of platform issues, including one incident where the DNS provider Heroku uses just stopped working in Israel (which Heroku gaslit me about for over a week). I don't know what "operating at scale" means to you, but if the service is consistently bad compared to the competition, it doesn't matter what scale they operate at. It's a meaningless metric.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#143

Post by jeltz »

underwater wrote: post #34
tempnow987 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not easy for a smaller tech company (often happy with their relatively lean stack) to integrate into a big company and its stack if integration was ever a goal (not sure it was). The hassle factor in a big company is 2x to do something, and you often have 1/2 the drive / vision / motivation. I do wonder though, do folks not have super clear plans for these acquisitions? They sometimes stagnate surprisingly. We…

I've been through an acquisition like you mention and I was shocked at how little planning our acquiring company (a big one) had done to make it successful. Once the legal and finance stuff was done there was almost zero process and structure set up to ensure we would succeed. Everything was ad hoc. We ended up in a bureaucratic environment with unrealistic expectations, trying to integrate with undocumented in-house…

I also imagine that integrating 16 people company is much easier than integrating a medium sized company like Heroku.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#144

Post by jarek83 »

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'…

We've been using Heroku for over 7 years now, from day 1 of our project. The amount of value it gave us is well beyond what we are paying them. We basically could forget about DevOps thanks to Heroku. For me this is an example of product that was a massive success, for both, the clients and them, providers.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#145

Post by eastbound »

dubswithus wrote: post #138
eastbound wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 argumen…

> microservice

At least it has become a running gag in our company that anyone suggesting microservices is joking. It’s a good first-step towards limiting Resume-Driven Development.

For the scale of our cloud product (1000€/month for now), we could manage everything in memory.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#146

Post by mfo4321 »

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'…

No post body was provided.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#147

Post by jolux »

dubswithus wrote: post #140
jolux wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no requirement to use Docker while developing, it's just useful when you need to deploy.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#148

Post by tedmiston »

tedmiston wrote: post #131
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

*that should say not the right metric to focus on...

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#149

Post by eastbound »

nikanj wrote: post #123
eastbound wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Are you actually offering them ownership, i.e. large enough equity to have any say in corporate matters? Not just financial instruments that can lead to ownership after a years-long vesting schedule+exercising?

Will they perform better if I give them a million dollars for free?

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#150

Post by nikanj »

eastbound wrote: post #149
nikanj wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you actually offering them ownership, i.e. large enough equity to have any say in corporate matters? Not just financial instruments that can lead to ownership after a years-long vesting schedule+exercising?

Will they perform better if I give them a million dollars for free?

So your main complaint is: "People without ownership act without ownership"?
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