Why did Heroku fail?

It’s a preview of all big fish:small fish acquisitions really. There are some notable exceptions, but for the most part you should assume that an acquisition of a product you use will eventually mean you’ll need to go elsewhere imo.

Heroku failed?

A compelling successor to both Heroku and App Engine is Google Cloud Run. Dead simple to setup, no frills and cheap to run.

The all in one app platform model just doesn’t work for everything.

What CIO/CTO is going to bet everything on some magic high level platform?

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'ing files around for deployment. While 12factor later become canonized it was built into Heroku since day 1. Heroku was created because you could spend a month building a MVP app in Rails, but then it'd take as long to deploy it as to build it. Deploying software was too hard. And today we're still trying to get back to that, sometimes very unsuccessfully by adding abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer. Did Heroku fail? We're still talking about it over 10 years since being acquired as a gold standard for developer experience.

Okay, fine, but it wasn't acquired for something like GitHub... While two very different companies Heroku was acquired nearly 10 years earlier. It was the first large scale acquisition out of YC. I do not know the internals of YC, but it's been commented by others that know it better the exit of Heroku helped greatly YC for the time and place it was. It was a different time. Heroku to this day generates revenue and likely it's different from what people expect.

Yeah this one is selfish, but you can largely thank Heroku for Amazon RDS. Way back in the day we had Rails devs asking for a database. We thought how hard could this be, it turns out it was much more work than we expected. We bet on Postgres because one of our engineers said it had a great track record of security and reliability (not playing fast and loose with data semantics)–it was the right choice. Years later when Amazon adding support for Postgres on RDS the team sent some personal notes that essentially said, this is because you made it so in demand.

Now... what went wrong.

Yes, several people left after the acquisition, some at 2-3 years, some at 4-5 years, some are still there and have been before the acquisition. Acquisition or not when some of the technical and product visionaries leave it's hard to replace that. Adam gave his absolute all, he was spent after. 12factor felt like his going away letter. But that void was never fully filled, some of us may have had a shot of it, but after long runs were also tired.

Was Heroku cocky at times toward Salesforce integration, at times yes. At times I don't think was always the case. Did we want to run 20GB J2EE apps when Rails/Django/Node were lighter-weight, of course not. Did we want to login to gus to open a support ticket on a VPN? No. Did we want to move into the SDFC offices that were cube farms vs. large ceilings with a lot of natural lighting?No. But could Salesforce help us make Heroku more available to customers and accelerate adoption? Sure. Could we have focused more on enterprise requirements around security and compliance to reach the enterprise audience? Yep. In retrospect maybe we should have proactively integrated a bit more, I know many of us there at that time feel that way, but there were pockets of integration. I recall hosting the Sayonara team at the Heroku office for a Friday happy hour. We made sure to have it well catered and make them feel as welcome as possible. There was good and bad in the integration, but a common metric of acquisition metrics is how many that are employed at time of acquisition are employed x years later. Heroku had a lot of us still there, 2, 3, 4, 5 and even beyond.

Was pricing and business model a factor? Maybe. But I'm not sure you can get what Heroku gives you out of a single employee. I'm excited for what others are building in this space now, but it's not about being a "cheaper" Heroku it's about creating some advancements about easier networking, packaging what defines as an app as multiple services, signed/secure builds.