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An Update on Heroku

heroku.com

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Re: An Update on Heroku

#131

Post by brightball »

michaelsbradley wrote: post #126
brightball wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember feeling the same way about Slicehost back in the day after Rackspace acquired them. Loved Slicehost. Not too long after though, Digital Ocean appeared with everything I loved about Slicehost and has kept getting better ever since. I feel like that's Fly.io now. They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities...while improving on pricing, particularly…

I was working for Slicehost at the time, we were a tiny team working our butts off in a loft office in downtown St. Louis, with a few remote employees. To my understanding there was a runway-growth problem. Could the founders raise and spend (efficiently) enough money quickly enough to keep the business viable? It would be a big gamble and the alternatives were to shut down (no way!) or sell. So they sold. Rackspace…

All I can say is thank you. I learned to manage servers because of Slicehost and the articles on it back then.

I remember being excited by the merger because well, Rackspace had such a fantastic reputation at the time. People still tell stories about their service. The Rackspace Cloud was just up against an absolute monster in AWS and never really became competitive.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#133

Post by caffeinated_me »

decidertm wrote: post #84
ezekg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any public docs on how y'all migrate customers out of Heroku Postgres without downtime? Seems to be the sticking point for a lot of people, myself included.

hey! northflank supports the same buildpacks that you run on Heroku, so it should be fairly straightforward. we have these docs for a more detailed walkthrough: 1/ https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/migrate-from-hero... 2/ https://northflank.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-heroku-a-ste...

Looks like that still has downtime for a Postgres migration- you're suggesting going into maintenance mode and just doing a dump/restore. I've seen that take hours once you hit the terabyte scale, depending on hardware.

I've had pretty good luck setting up logical replication from Heroku to the new provider and having a 10-15 minute maintenance window to catch up once it's in sync. Might be worth considering.

You might also want to add a warning about Postgres versions. There's some old bugs around primary key hash functions that can cause corruption on a migration. I've seen it twice when migrating from Heroku to other vendors.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#134

Post by mindwok »

syx wrote: post #47
an0malous wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best alternative?

Moved from heroku to fly.io three years ago and I don’t regret it, great platform occasionally goes down and requires a bit of attention but the support forum is great

Fly.io are absolute G’s. The product is awesome and the tech blogs they write are fantastic.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#135

Post by michaelsbradley »

brightball wrote: post #131
michaelsbradley wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was working for Slicehost at the time, we were a tiny team working our butts off in a loft office in downtown St. Louis, with a few remote employees. To my understanding there was a runway-growth problem. Could the founders raise and spend (efficiently) enough money quickly enough to keep the business viable? It would be a big gamble and the alternatives were to shut down (no way!) or sell. So they sold. Rackspace…

All I can say is thank you. I learned to manage servers because of Slicehost and the articles on it back then. I remember being excited by the merger because well, Rackspace had such a fantastic reputation at the time. People still tell stories about their service. The Rackspace Cloud was just up against an absolute monster in AWS and never really became competitive.

Thank you for the kind words, brought back some fun and interesting memories. I spent a lot of time helping to write and edit those articles, as did my coworkers, glad they helped you!

Re: An Update on Heroku

#136

Post by BoorishBears »

satvikpendem wrote: post #96
an0malous wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best alternative?

If you like VPS, Hetzner with Dokploy. It works great, the UI has essentially all the features of Fly or Render that you'd use for deployment, like preview build URLs and environments.

Very close to the worst alternative for people who actually need Heroku, but it won't stop people from plugging it to death and back.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#137

Post by bmenrigh »

codegeek wrote: post #119
bearjaws wrote: post #88

The downfall of Heroku should be studied, they had lightning in a bottle and blew it. Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.

Nothing to study. A common scenario when a mega corp acquires an incredibly successful startup and then lets it die. Happens more often than not. This is why I chuckle when I see an acquisition and the founders claim "Nothing is changing. We are not going anywhere" . There may be exceptions but the moment a hugely successful company like heroku gets acquired, you know it's most likely game over. To their credit, they…

Often "nothing is changing" ends up being more literal than the founders realize or intend. Acquisitions by big companies tend to slow the development to a crawl as development bureaucracy takes over. When a great product is practically frozen in time it stops being great in 5-15 years as the rest of the world passes them by.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#138

Post by satvikpendem »

BoorishBears wrote: post #136
satvikpendem wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like VPS, Hetzner with Dokploy. It works great, the UI has essentially all the features of Fly or Render that you'd use for deployment, like preview build URLs and environments.

Very close to the worst alternative for people who actually need Heroku, but it won't stop people from plugging it to death and back.

Eh, no, depends on why you used Heroku in the first place. Way back when, I used it because the UI was dead simple and it Just Worked™. If I can replicate that with a VPS and have a good UI around it that takes care of everything, it's functionally the same to me.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#139

Post by paxys »

simonw wrote: post #10

"We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers." Proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.

If any Heroku customer is reading this and not immediately going "we need to move off Heroku ASAP" all future problems are their own fault.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#140

Post by altairprime »

simonw wrote: post #10

"We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers." Proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.

As a former enterprise person, this clearly states “exiting growth cycle into low-staffing maintenance mode”; Salesforce must have bought them to kill a price-beating competitor to multi-year Salesforce PaaS contracts, same as Okta did with Auth0. Investors are typically-majority short-sighted and only care about growth-cycle revenue, so once they reached market saturation, they were ripe and duly reaped. So long, Heroku.
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