151–160 of 216 posts
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Not so much, no.
If compliance affects any user-facing property of the product, then they are, by definition. Onboarding users/partners would be easier without making them read/click all those consent checkboxes, etc.
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The customer account wasn't terminated, the free DB being used by paid Dynos was deleted without any input from or notification to the customer. I highly doubt normal customers want this clock short when the cancellation is not customer initiated.
Data retention policies are written by compliance people, not product people, so distinctions like overt, deliberate cancellation and "cancellation for nonpayment" or "abandonment" or "discontinuation" usually aren't captured in them. I'm not saying it's great that Heroku deleted these databases; I'm saying: the description given upthread, that the databases were deleted because of contractual requirements, is super…
I had a vague thought for a moment about maybe being able to give customers the option to opt in to an updated set of terms that would've been better designed for the situation ... but since the original Tell HN author didn't get any emails about this at all, presumably they wouldn't've got that one either so even if (and given 'vague thought' I'm not claiming any particular level of 'good idea' to it) that had been done it presumably wouldn't've helped them anyway.
It seems to me the root problem here isn't so much the compliance initiated policies as a complete failure to take 'make sure people have been adequately warned' sufficiently seriously given the potential consequences.
Deeply unfortunate.
(read that last sentence in understated deadpan dry en_UK to get an appropriate read on just how impressed I'm not by the communications cockup)
"I learned my lesson about not doing an offsite backup regularly" Heroku is a shitshow after the Salesforce takeover and not to shit on you because I know it really sucks. BUT please everyone, do offsite backups and test them. Please people. Please. If you have anything that is important, BACK THEM UP on your own outside of the provider. Heck, we wrote our own script to backup RDS databases offsite as well even thoug…
After the Salesforce takeover? The one in 2010? So Heroku was good in like a year!?
Then, year by year, those things were taken away. Eventually, circa 2018, investment in the core H product started being reduced and individuals and teams started being reorged to focus on Salesforce priorities. H became a "keeping the lights on" job. Folks who wanted to keep pushing left to work on GitHub actions or on render.com, netlify, other places still striving for great devex.
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Are you allowed to inform paying customers that you are going to do this? This is my primary complaint here. I don't understand how this oversight happened. This is going to cause an enormous amount of time and energy to recover from this.
I use heroku at work at they definitely sent out a ton of emails. It also said they were going to delete them right above all third party plugins (even if you weren’t using their database service)
The fact that the failure to send a single warning email to this particular customer wasn't both detected and considered a five alarm fire level bug under the circumstances is the thing that moved the decision to sunset the free tier from sad to disastrous for the user who posted the Tell HN in the first place.
The reputation hit to Heroku is real. Its so too bad that they've made these changes, and stopped pushing new features. I built my prior business on heroku and it was wonderful. Now with this current company I've switched to Render (through am looking for something else). For me the writing was on the wall for Heroku and it wasn't worth it to me to dig in there if new features and support wasn't a given. Curious for…
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Herokai here. Unfortunately we had no choice on the data retention front — once we’ve disconnected your database, we aren’t ALLOWED to hold your data for more than 30 days. That’s part of the data scrubbing protocol that we agree to when you sign up. We fought hard for 90+ days internally, but in the end couldn’t get over the issue that we’d be in violation of our contracts with customers.
If I'm understanding you correctly, the 30 day policy is one that Heroku chose to put in the contract. Engineering might have fought the terms, and yes they need to be followed once set, but it seems totally fair to blame Heroku for creating the limitation in the first place.
Plus, it would all likely have worked out fine if they'd emailed the customer a warning or three like they intended to do - it was the failure to do so combined with the failure to detect and remediate the initial failure that sent things down such a dark path here.
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After the Salesforce takeover? The one in 2010? So Heroku was good in like a year!?
Heh. I always loved Heroku and have complained that Salesforce is messing it up recently, but turns out the first time I used Heroku was like 5 years after the acquisition. I think Salesforce just started inserting their own branding more recently.
(guess based only on having watched things unfold from the outside without ever being a user/customer so please do add salt to taste)
Yup - this happened to me too. It was wildly frustrating, but they did send few emails looking back - it was just a really small project and it wasn't on my radar. What pissed me off most is that I WAS paying for the account. I was paying $17/mo for redis and dynos, so there was an active card on file. Why not just start charging for the postgres db, and only delete if there's no active billing? Heroku was already a…
Probably because the original terms you agreed to were written not anticipating Salesforce perpetrating this and so while I would not at all be surprised if the vast majority of customers in your position would've been entirely happy with it they probably didn't have a legal path to do so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The customer account wasn't terminated, the free DB being used by paid Dynos was deleted without any input from or notification to the customer. I highly doubt normal customers want this clock short when the cancellation is not customer initiated.
Data retention policies are written by compliance people, not product people, so distinctions like overt, deliberate cancellation and "cancellation for nonpayment" or "abandonment" or "discontinuation" usually aren't captured in them. I'm not saying it's great that Heroku deleted these databases; I'm saying: the description given upthread, that the databases were deleted because of contractual requirements, is super…