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Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

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Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#11

Post by lancefisher »

LAMike wrote: post #7

On one hand the Rap Genius expose seemed like they got duped and mislead, but on the other hand something about this lawyer mentioned in the article comes off as ambulance-chase-y to me.

It's not really ambulance chasing if all he's after is a partial refund.

From the article:

As for Lehman, he wants some of the $20,000 his company pays Heroku each month returned. “We deserve some sort of refund here,” he says.

EDIT: I re-read the article, and it's not even clear that Rap Genius is part of this. Looks like a lawyer trying to drum up support.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#13

Post by Adaptive »

redthrowaway wrote: post #2

>Heroku declined our request for further comment. “Unfortunately, we can’t publicly comment on legal matters,” said spokeswoman Dana Oshiro in an email. “Heroku is committed to our customers’ success and focused on delivering the best possible product and experience. We’ll continue to update our customers via our blog.” I don't run a company, and I'm not responsible for maximizing return on my shareholders' investmen…

Sadly, the US legal system does not reward heartfelt, honest statements, particularly in these situations.

Which is why fine print almost always makes even the nicest company sound like a jerk.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#14

Post by lancefisher »

From the article, Heroku says, "The problem affected an older version of Heroku’s service, he said, and those who use a new version of the service would not have these issues."

As far as I understand that is not really the case. The newer version is the Cedar stack which supports concurrent apps where Bamboo only supports non-concurrent apps. This would reduce the problem with random routing, but not eliminate it.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#15

Post by bridgeyman »

In MIT's Mathematics for Computer Scientists course (6.042), I remember learning from Tom Leighton that in certain cases randomly distributing jobs actually IS the optimal solution to load balancing. This technique was somehow associated with Akamai, Professor Leighton's company.

Maybe I am misremembering...

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#16

Post by tomlemon »

eli wrote: post #4

IANAL, but my understanding is that threatening a class action lawsuit is easy, but actually bringing an action to court is extremely difficult. And (at least to me) this seems like an awfully weak case -- I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud. The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regard…

> If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?

We didn't know how bad the performance was because Heroku's tools (logs and New Relic) reported incorrect performance data (i.e., they said requests weren't queuing when they were actually spending a ton of time queuing)

EDIT:

> Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation had been 100% correct and instead the problem was just plain old slow I/O on Heroku's side?

To be clear, we have no official association with http://herokuclassaction.com/ or the lawyer behind it – I actually found out about the site from the article's author when he interviewed me for the story.

(But I do think Heroku owes its customers a refund)

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#17

Post by eli »

niggler wrote: post #10
eli wrote: post #4

IANAL, but my understanding is that threatening a class action lawsuit is easy, but actually bringing an action to court is extremely difficult. And (at least to me) this seems like an awfully weak case -- I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud. The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regard…

Ianal stands for I am not a lawyer, so "a lawyer" in "IANAL a lawyer" is redundant.

Hah, fixed. Sometimes my fingers get ahead of my brain when typing quickly.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#18

Post by redthrowaway »

resu_nimda wrote: post #9
redthrowaway wrote: post #2

>Heroku declined our request for further comment. “Unfortunately, we can’t publicly comment on legal matters,” said spokeswoman Dana Oshiro in an email. “Heroku is committed to our customers’ success and focused on delivering the best possible product and experience. We’ll continue to update our customers via our blog.” I don't run a company, and I'm not responsible for maximizing return on my shareholders' investmen…

They have made public statements on their blog, and hopefully that will continue. In this situation, I think it is the right move to avoid getting involved with this shameless law firm trying to incite drama for their own gain.

This seems like precisely the type of situation class action lawsuits are intended to deal with: a company defrauded a lot of its customers in the same way. It makes more sense for all parties that the case be tried as one than to hear each claimant individually.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#19

Post by arihant »

eli wrote: post #4

IANAL, but my understanding is that threatening a class action lawsuit is easy, but actually bringing an action to court is extremely difficult. And (at least to me) this seems like an awfully weak case -- I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud. The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regard…

I think after reading the article, it is pretty clear they did not notice the routing issues until they noticed slowed down performance and till their consumers complained. That makes perfect sense, you don't really dig deep into routing until you hit a bottleneck, specially when you are unable to monitor it, and specially when your provider is lying to you about how they route.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#20

Post by randall »

lancefisher wrote: post #14

From the article, Heroku says, "The problem affected an older version of Heroku’s service, he said, and those who use a new version of the service would not have these issues." As far as I understand that is not really the case. The newer version is the Cedar stack which supports concurrent apps where Bamboo only supports non-concurrent apps. This would reduce the problem with random routing, but not eliminate it.

The problem is not that they provide random routing, the problem is they said in their documentation that they provided intelligent routing, a design choice they backed off of when they switched stacks.

Customers still have a problem, but Heroku doesn't from a legal / class action-y perspective.

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