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An Update on Heroku

heroku.com

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Re: An Update on Heroku

#251

Post by tyre »

satvikpendem wrote: post #205
BoorishBears wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Depends on what you used it for" applies to just about any platform. Realistically, self-hosting the PaaS defeats the purpose of a PaaS for the crowd Heroku was attracting.

Heroku was one of the first to have that seamless UX, only after which others like Fly or Render or Railway came to copy it. I wager people were primarily attracted to that user experience and only minimally cared that it was fully hosted versus not, because there was also AWS at that time.

Having used Heroku at multiple startups during the 2012–2015 years, this is not correct.

With heroku you could `git push heroku master` and it would do everything else from there. The UX was nice, but that was not the reason people chose it. It was so easy compared to running on EC2 instances with salt or whatever. For simple projects, it was incredible.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#253

Post by satvikpendem »

tyre wrote: post #251
satvikpendem wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroku was one of the first to have that seamless UX, only after which others like Fly or Render or Railway came to copy it. I wager people were primarily attracted to that user experience and only minimally cared that it was fully hosted versus not, because there was also AWS at that time.

Having used Heroku at multiple startups during the 2012–2015 years, this is not correct. With heroku you could `git push heroku master` and it would do everything else from there. The UX was nice, but that was not the reason people chose it. It was so easy compared to running on EC2 instances with salt or whatever. For simple projects, it was incredible.

That's literally the UX I'm talking about and that's what other companies copied too. To be clear, I'm not (just) talking about how heroku.com looks and works, I'm talking about the entire user experience including git push to deploy, so I believe you are agreeing with me here. That is why I said VPS with Dokploy or Coolify and so on have the same UX, both in the command line with git push deploys supported as well as (now, at least) a vastly superior website user experience, akin to Vercel.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#254

Post by gonational »

Folcon wrote: post #241
asenchi wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

This!

It absolutely boggles my mind that nothing else exists to fill this spot. Fly and others offer varying degrees of easier-than-AWS hosting, but nobody offers true PaaS like Heroku, IMHO.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#255

Post by ameliaquining »

simonw wrote: post #182
toyg wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has been the case for a very long time at this point, the Salesforce acquisition was a death knell. The only stuff i have left on Heroku are zombie projects I don't care about.

The Salesforce acquisition closed in 2010, when Heroku was barely three years old. A whole lot of Heroku's best features shipped after they were acquired. They had a pretty good run under Salesforce for the first few years. It would be interesting to hear a full oral history of when and where things went wrong after that. I expect the original founders leaving was a major factor.

I think a lot of people are under the misconception that the Salesforce acquisition happened a lot later than it really did. In particular, I think people often implicitly date it to the late-2010s-ish period when Heroku's product emphasis got more visibly enterprisey, and in particular when it started putting integrations with Salesforce's other products front and center.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#256

Post by airstrike »

gonational wrote: post #254
Folcon wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

This! It absolutely boggles my mind that nothing else exists to fill this spot. Fly and others offer varying degrees of easier-than-AWS hosting, but nobody offers true PaaS like Heroku, IMHO.

I find render.com basically as good as Heroku and certainly much better than fly.io's unpredictable pricing

Re: An Update on Heroku

#257

Post by tptacek »

prmph wrote: post #159
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…

Not sure why people love fly.io over all the other competitors so much. I myself prefer render.com, for the simplicity and predictability of their billing, and their deployment model is so intuitive

I think people mostly like the cool balloons Annie draws for us.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#258

Post by tptacek »

ojusave wrote: post #87
swat535 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does render compare to fly.io? Does anyone has experience running production rails apps on these?

https://render.com/articles/render-vs-fly-io

Honestly, this is super fair. I went in expecting to hate-read it (not because I have any issues with Render, they're great, just these X vs. Y competitive posts). But yeah, I think this is a reasonable way to look at it.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#259

Post by almost »

decidertm wrote: post #82

Disclaimer: Founder of northflank.com here so very clearly biased. But if you’re looking for an alternative, reach out. If not, all good. Heroku pioneered what a PaaS could be, alongside Cloud Foundry and others, so I’m genuinely sad to see it go down like this. We built Northflank because we saw enterprises wanting to deploy workloads in their own VPC with Heroku-level simplicity. Over the past 5 years, our mission…

I've been incredibly happy with Northflank since moving over a few years ago after Heroku got unreliable. Felt like an upgrade from Heroku and the support and reliability have been great.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#260

Post by raverbashing »

paxys wrote: post #139
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.

Honestly if you're still using Heroku today it's because you haven't really caught up with what's going on around you
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