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Heroku Class Action

herokuclassaction.com

41–50 of 78 posts

Re: Heroku Class Action

#41
post #26
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old bamboo stack has the same old intelligent routing, but the intelligence is only within each router. When the number of routers increased, the intelligence stopped mattering because concurrent requests were highly likely to not be handled by the same router, making the routing effectively random instead of intelligent. So what you suggest would be great, but unfortunately not possible.

I'll just repeat my previous comment: For $60,000 per month they can't create a mode where all your dynos are behind a single HAProxy with "intelligent" least-connections load balancing?

[deleted]

Re: Heroku Class Action

#42
post #19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree this does seem to just be a law firm trying to make some money, Heroku did directly lie to developers about Cedar stack's routing being "intelligent" when it is indeed random. New Relic's plugin was pretty quickly updated to include the missing time after the rapgenius article came out. But that doesn't excuse Heroku from lying about what they were selling and so far they've done nothing to make amends…

The misleading documentation that started all the controversy was about Heroku's legacy Bamboo stack, not the new Cedar stack. The Cedar stack (which Heroku has been encouraging people to use for a long while now) has always claimed to do random routing.

This isn't true. Their main "how it works" page claimed intelligent routing with no mention of which stack. This has been changed since the uproar. There are other places the same.

This is only part of the whole story as well.

Re: Heroku Class Action

#43
post #25

My startup is heavily invested in and tied to Heroku. We don't have the resources right now to get off of the platform quickly, but plan to as soon as possible. Like Rapleaf, we have spent an enormous amount of effort optimizing and searching for the causes of latency, and overpay for dynos to reduce but not eliminate the chance of latency issues. Heroku has always told us it's our fault. While I have no interest in…

> While I have no interest in recovering money through a class action lawsuit

I note that there are zero words devoted to what fraction of the money will leave the coffers of the lawyers and actually make it to the customers.

Re: Heroku Class Action

#44
post #27
post #25

My startup is heavily invested in and tied to Heroku. We don't have the resources right now to get off of the platform quickly, but plan to as soon as possible. Like Rapleaf, we have spent an enormous amount of effort optimizing and searching for the causes of latency, and overpay for dynos to reduce but not eliminate the chance of latency issues. Heroku has always told us it's our fault. While I have no interest in…

[deleted]

As bad as the latency-creating bottlenecks with random-routing and single-threaded apps can get, it is always the case that "twisting the magic knob" of adding more dynos would help. It just wouldn't help as much as people expected it to. Further, the amount of paid-for capacity left idle (while other dynos were backed-up) offends many sensibilities about how a system "ought to" work.

But at least at the margin, the "magic knob" still worked a little. I think that's why the problem festered: there was always a default recommendation -- "more dynos!" -- that helped, which also just happened to fit the mental model Heroku promotes (while also boosting its revenue). In one of the older support logs RapGenius posted, it was evident that while RapGenius was suspicious about so many dynos being necessary, they let the ticket close once that expensive-but-temporarily-suitable 'fix' was in place. They (and Heroku) turned the magic knob and then let their attention move on to other things.

Re: Heroku Class Action

#45

Ok this is going too far. Did Heroku make a mistake? Yes. Did they mislead and lie to their customers? Yes. But is it worth pursuing a class action lawsuit that could ultimately ruin them - if not financially, but force their mgmt team to focus on this damn suit rather than fixing the damn problems? Hells no. I hope RapGenius is not the lead plaintiff in this, otherwise I will be very disappointed. I applaud them for…

When material damages happen as a result of fraud or breaking an agreement, then the party shares liability for those damages.

This is the right thing to do. Heroku made their bed and now they must lie in it.

Re: Heroku Class Action

#46

Ok this is going too far. Did Heroku make a mistake? Yes. Did they mislead and lie to their customers? Yes. But is it worth pursuing a class action lawsuit that could ultimately ruin them - if not financially, but force their mgmt team to focus on this damn suit rather than fixing the damn problems? Hells no. I hope RapGenius is not the lead plaintiff in this, otherwise I will be very disappointed. I applaud them for…

Heroku is owned by SalesForce, a publicly-traded multi-billion dollar company. It has annual revenues in the hundreds of billions.

They have the resources to handle the suit and fix the "damn problems" at the same time.

Re: Heroku Class Action

#47

Ok this is going too far. Did Heroku make a mistake? Yes. Did they mislead and lie to their customers? Yes. But is it worth pursuing a class action lawsuit that could ultimately ruin them - if not financially, but force their mgmt team to focus on this damn suit rather than fixing the damn problems? Hells no. I hope RapGenius is not the lead plaintiff in this, otherwise I will be very disappointed. I applaud them for…

Actually, it's unlikely it could ruin them. They are owned by SalesForce who can afford it. (likely part of the motivation for the class-action)

I think Heroku has done a tremendous amount of good, especially in the Ruby community. This needs to be considered with the bad.

Re: Heroku Class Action

#48
Do class action lawsuits actually have any effect on business practices? Just seems like an extortion that is somehow legal. No one benefits but the lawyers. Recently I've been included in a bunch unbeknownst to me that require me to submit written notes within a week of notice to NOT be included. Why can't we just eliminate the middleman in these cases to cause real change?

Re: Heroku Class Action

#50
post #15

oh look, a parasitic lawyer-company trying to suck some money out of a technology company. it must be a day that ends in -y.

You honestly don't believe that, if the allegations are true, Heroku has done something wrong?

I think what Heroku did is wrong, but I still think class action suits are usually complete bullshit. The lawyers make off with millions or billions while distributing peanuts to the class action plaintiffs.

Inequitable money distribution aside, I think the bad press Heroku has received over this is probably enough punishment. I don't support how they handled this situation but the core problem isn't exactly that bad in the first place. Nobody died here, some companies simply had slow websites and to some degree that's their own fault, they should have done their own external monitoring if that sort of critical performance was that vital to them.

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