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An Update on Heroku

heroku.com

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Re: An Update on Heroku

#241

Post by Folcon »

asenchi wrote: post #220
bgentry wrote: post #187

As somebody whose first day working at Heroku was the day this acquisition closed, I think it’s mostly a misconception to blame Salesforce for Heroku’s stagnation and eventual irrelevance. Salesforce gave Heroku a ton of funding to build out a vision that was way ahead of its time. Docker didn’t even come out until 2013, AWS didn’t even have multiple regions when it was built. They mostly served as an investor and le…

It remains the greatest engineering team I've ever seen or had the pleasure to be a part of. I was only there from early 2011 to mid 2012 but what I took with me changed me as an engineer. The shear brilliance of the ideas and approaches...I was blessed to witness it. I don't think I can overstate it, though many will think this is all hyperbole. I didn't always agree with the decisions made and I was definitely ther…

I'm just going to chime in here and say thank you, there still really isn't in my mind a comparable offering to heroku's git push and go straight to a reasonable production

I honestly find it a bit nuts, there's offerings that come close, but using them I still get the impression that they've just not put in the time really refining that user interface, so I just wanted to say thank you for the work you and the GP did, it was incredibly helpful and I'm happy to say helped me launch and test a few product offerings as well as some fun ideas

Re: An Update on Heroku

#242

Post by ryantgtg »

eek2121 wrote: post #183
chris_marino wrote: post #142

This news from Heroku does not come as any surprise to the people that were there (as I was). Lots of moving parts and second guessing (that I won't share), but one thing I will say is: Incentives matter. The seeds of this outcome were planted years ago when sales comp plans changed. When a sales rep can hit their target by simply converting the way an existing customer gets billed, none of them look for new business…

Most of my career, I've worked for startups and small/medium sized businesses, mostly using Ruby On Rails or Node based stuff for language/frameworks. In every single company I've worked for in the past 15-20 years in this capacity the biggest focus was to exit heroku as quickly as possible. The reason: Price. You don't get to charge a premium for tooling, especially not when open source tooling exists that lets you…

This is my experience, too. Heroku didn’t stay competitive price-wise with alternatives. And scaling even slightly from the basic dynos quadrupled (or whatever) the price.

Feature and experience-wise, we were always really happy with heroku.

I don’t know if this fits with the “salesforce purchased and let stagnate” narrative that nearly everyone here is pushing.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#243

Post by burlesona »

Sad, although I guess I'm not surprised.

I think it's fair to say that, if not for Heroku, I would not have had a career in software. I learned how to code web apps from books, and had a breakthrough when I discovered Rails (in 2009 I think?). But for the life of me I did not understand how to deploy a Rails app.

I bashed my head against that wall for a while, then found Heroku, and it just worked. That let me ship a product when I barely knew what I was doing, which let me keep building and learning, until eventually I didn't need Heroku anymore. But I still always liked it, because I never enjoyed thinking about infrastructure.

RIP Heroku, you were legendary.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#244

Post by neya »

They shot themselves in the foot a long time ago and never recovered from that, I guess. I remember back in 2012-13 they made some changes that ghosted their primary ICP - indie devs and startup owners. They made the platform incredibly expensive to run. A lot of us panicked and had to move to other vendors - I in particular chose Google's AppEngine which was hugely under-appreciated at the time and eventually became a GCP consultant. All thanks to Heroku. Some of my other friends switched to Engine Yard (for rails) and the rest just went on to learn how to self host stuff onto EC2 instances. Heroku knowingly or unknowingly made a lot of careers of the present day engineers in AWS and GCP (including myself). So, I am a bit sad to see them in such a situation if I'm being honest.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#245

Post by sreekanth850 »

WildGreenLeave wrote: post #89

Wow, I have to admit that I have not heard anyone in the past 2 years or so to be on Heroku so it makes sense. I think they handled it quite well knowing that there most likely have been a steady decline of users. Generally I would avoid promoting myself but in this situation I think it fits the topic. I'm co-founder of a Platform-as-a-Service based in Europe named Ploi Cloud [0]. We focus on web applications working…

is this linked with Ploi.io?

Re: An Update on Heroku

#246

Post by jamwil »

carefree-bob wrote: post #186
altairprime wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, He…

You are saying the plan was to buy a "price-beating competitor", invest in them for 16 years, and then finally pull the rug out now?

First of all, you and me, start workin’ at the bank

Re: An Update on Heroku

#247

Post by throwawaypath »

One of the worst "engineers" I've suffered working with (spent all day on Slack virtue signaling, put on a PIP) went to Heroku. A comment I made was "only a sinking ship would take them/her." This update from Heroku does not surprise me.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#249

Post by bgentry »

asenchi wrote: post #220
bgentry wrote: post #187

As somebody whose first day working at Heroku was the day this acquisition closed, I think it’s mostly a misconception to blame Salesforce for Heroku’s stagnation and eventual irrelevance. Salesforce gave Heroku a ton of funding to build out a vision that was way ahead of its time. Docker didn’t even come out until 2013, AWS didn’t even have multiple regions when it was built. They mostly served as an investor and le…

It remains the greatest engineering team I've ever seen or had the pleasure to be a part of. I was only there from early 2011 to mid 2012 but what I took with me changed me as an engineer. The shear brilliance of the ideas and approaches...I was blessed to witness it. I don't think I can overstate it, though many will think this is all hyperbole. I didn't always agree with the decisions made and I was definitely ther…

Absolutely agree and likewise buddy :)

Re: An Update on Heroku

#250

Post by aqme28 »

glenngillen wrote: post #206
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.

They had lightning in a bottle because they had an amazing developer experience… and gave everyone free compute and data transfer. So much of the value was already delivered in that simple `git push heroku master` which gave you a container + load balancer + a database. The vast majority of people didn’t need more. And of those that were left that did far too few of them were willing to suddenly start paying $32/mo p…

And the company I worked for hired a full devops team to save us like 5 grand per month on Heroku, only to end up with a much worse developer experience.
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