Interestingly, someone tried to spam a bunch of comment threads with this a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=herokulawsuit
Heroku Class Action
71–78 of 78 posts
Re: Heroku Class Action
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
They blatantly lied about how a core part of their service worked for years. It was raised to them previously and they didn't change the docs nor the way their system worked. This negatively affected a lot of their customers in many ways (overspending on heroku, time wasted, lost customers and revenue). When Heroku's customers have incurred significant costs and/or losses because of Heroku's false claims, I don't see…
They didn't "blatantly lie"....they lied. They built their product 1 way and it morphed into another architecture as they grew. They made decisions that optimized for their financial benefit, but I wouldn't go as far as to say they "blatantly lied". Let's not get too carried away here. As a long time Heroku user, I was pissed when I heard this...but they have done so much good for my own development career and freela…
Think of it like this, if a food restaurant has a vegetarian burger on the menu. After a while they find that as they grow they can't keep producing the burger that way anymore. So they decide to use a beef product in the burger, but they don't tell anyone. They just keep selling it as a vegetarian burger. Do you think that is blatantly lying? I don't see a lot of difference here.
Re: Heroku Class Action
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, uh, what was the thought process when choosing a PAAS provider? I mean, step back for a moment, and ignore the specifics of Heroku; they are a PAAS provider with no completely compatible competitors, is that not so? Whenever I choose service providers (or choose to outsource services) my first thought is "what happens if I have to switch away from them?" Even if you think my first rule of business is too cynical,…
That's certainly a consideration, but every PAAS is "unique" by definition. Something like Google Apps has more lock-in than others. Some like Heroku are attractive because they have features not available elsewhere that would take a lot of resources to reproduce. We chose heroku and Rails for the reasons you suggest, and even tried to avoid major tie-ins to the platform. That doesn't mean it's trivial to move to ano…
> That's certainly a consideration, but every PAAS is "unique" by definition.
I don't see how this is true.
There is nothing about PaaS that says there can't be compatible competitors. Hell, there have been PHP shared hosting platforms that were very nearly identical between providers for a decade before anyone started saying PaaS, and really, the "Innovation" that made shared hosting PaaS lies in per-usage billing.
Re: Heroku Class Action
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
They blatantly lied about how a core part of their service worked for years. It was raised to them previously and they didn't change the docs nor the way their system worked. This negatively affected a lot of their customers in many ways (overspending on heroku, time wasted, lost customers and revenue). When Heroku's customers have incurred significant costs and/or losses because of Heroku's false claims, I don't see…
They didn't "blatantly lie"....they lied. They built their product 1 way and it morphed into another architecture as they grew. They made decisions that optimized for their financial benefit, but I wouldn't go as far as to say they "blatantly lied". Let's not get too carried away here. As a long time Heroku user, I was pissed when I heard this...but they have done so much good for my own development career and freela…
I agree completely, it's not like "intelligent routing" is some standardized feature that people have come to expect from Heroku. What people expected was that their app could scale easily on Heroku which as it happens was not strictly true, but to some extent below some threshold it was probably true for most people. People here keep showing a poor understanding of the basics of queueing theory and system administration, as if "intelligent routing" is something they purposely removed just to screw people over.
Re: Heroku Class Action
#75It's to technical... I don't see a reason why you'd win.
Lies happen all the time, i saw someone here mention that Heroku didn't knew it was such a big deal.
They are expanding a lot, the issue (intelligent routing) has been raised and will be solved. They know what they've done wrong now... They didn't see it as a big issue before.
It's up to Heroku to resolve the problem, because at the end of the day it's an issue to be fixed.
And don't we see issues all the time in software development.
As long as the company itselves communicate about the problem and is honest about it when the problem comes up.
That's the only thing i would really care.
PS. I'm not associated (employed or client) by Heroku.
Re: Heroku Class Action
#76Sorry in advance for being a little off topic here: which VPS hosting companies have the best reputation for automatically restarting your failed VPS (for any reason) from the most recent backup? Many years ago, I was on vacation without an Internet access and my host provider restarted my instance and since I set up my services to start on boot up, all was good.
I would guess that I am a typical customer who does not really need fast scalability. I host several web apps with a modest number of users and what I care most about is reliability and then cost.
Re: Heroku Class Action
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's certainly a consideration, but every PAAS is "unique" by definition. Something like Google Apps has more lock-in than others. Some like Heroku are attractive because they have features not available elsewhere that would take a lot of resources to reproduce. We chose heroku and Rails for the reasons you suggest, and even tried to avoid major tie-ins to the platform. That doesn't mean it's trivial to move to ano…
> That's certainly a consideration, but every PAAS is "unique" by definition. I don't see how this is true. There is nothing about PaaS that says there can't be compatible competitors. Hell, there have been PHP shared hosting platforms that were very nearly identical between providers for a decade before anyone started saying PaaS, and really, the "Innovation" that made shared hosting PaaS lies in per-usage billing.
[deleted]
Re: Heroku Class Action
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, uh, what was the thought process when choosing a PAAS provider? I mean, step back for a moment, and ignore the specifics of Heroku; they are a PAAS provider with no completely compatible competitors, is that not so? Whenever I choose service providers (or choose to outsource services) my first thought is "what happens if I have to switch away from them?" Even if you think my first rule of business is too cynical,…
That's certainly a consideration, but every PAAS is "unique" by definition. Something like Google Apps has more lock-in than others. Some like Heroku are attractive because they have features not available elsewhere that would take a lot of resources to reproduce. We chose heroku and Rails for the reasons you suggest, and even tried to avoid major tie-ins to the platform. That doesn't mean it's trivial to move to ano…
That's not entirely true. Cloud Foundry (the software) is an open-source platform that allows for compatibility across providers. You can see a list of compatible providers here, in addition to cloudfoundry.com: http://www.cloudfoundry.com/partners
Full disclosure: I work for AppFog, one of the providers listed.