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An Update on Heroku

heroku.com

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Re: An Update on Heroku

#291

Post by zelphirkalt »

aqme28 wrote: post #250
glenngillen wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This problem one doesn't have, if one pays attention to devops from the start, maybe keeping 1 or 2 capable devops people, who keep things lean. Problem is of course finding the capable ones with the right mindset to keep things as simple and lean as possible.

The result of suddenly needing to hire devops should be to get a convenient setup, but then do you really still need the whole devops team? And if you don't, then hiring them for limited time might come at a cost (hiring freelancers or consultants).

Re: An Update on Heroku

#292

Post by allovertheworld »

brabel wrote: post #278
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…

> by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges. > the greatest engineering team I've ever seen How do these two things reconcile in your opinion? In my view , doing something quickly is the easy part , good engineering is only needed exactly when you want things to be maintainable and scalable, so the assertions above don’t really make much sense to me.

Yea it seems like not much thought was put into scalability.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#293

Post by muzani »

sarreph wrote: post #15
g8oz wrote: post #5

"transitioning to a sustaining engineering model". I don't care what anyone says, it takes real talent to come up with lines like this.

Surely it's a typo and they meant "sustainable"? Otherwise IMO such an odd word choice. Definition: >> providing physical or mental strength or support

They meant what they wrote. Merriam-Webster's definition: "to support the weight of"

It means they're transitioning to the absolute minimum to keep it alive and nothing more. That could, in worst cases, mean firing everyone except one guy, or using AI to keep it alive.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#294

Post by muzani »

I've had a zombie project running on this for many years now. I used to charge people about $25 for 'lifetime', but there's only about ~10 regular users on it, so I try to keep it alive.

Decided this is the time to make the switch over to AWS. They've been rather painful with cancellation. They required all dynos be downgraded to "Eco". Fine.

But this downgrade also incurred another $5 charge which they now required me to pay to remove the credit card. It's not much, but this is shady af.

The billing language has become increasingly shady over the years. Basic is "~$0.010/hour, Max of $7 per month". Eco is "~$0.005/hour, Flat fee of $5.00/month". But in reality, you're just being charged a flat $7 or $5 either way. Eco is visually shown as the "free" option, except it's not free at all.

I'd love to just keep using Heroku and paying some flat rate; we were talking about putting some more work & funding into the project and maybe scaling it up to thousands of users. But I have no idea what Heroku can actually scale to and how much it costs. AWS etc are also not that clear on costs, but at least their specifications is a little more detailed than "Superior performance for your very large-scale, high traffic app"

Re: An Update on Heroku

#297

Post by PanMan »

petcat wrote: post #30
simonw wrote: post #7

I wonder how much money Salesforce would need to sell what's left of Heroku to a better steward.

My understanding is that Heroku is just an AWS reseller. I don't know if there's a lot of value in a PaaS piggy-backing on another PaaS anymore. Especially for Salesforce.

Heroku does lots of revenue, even if they pay AWS. I do think it would be worth.. quite a bit. And I would be very happy if a better steward would buy it.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#298

Post by lngric006 »

airstrike wrote: post #256
gonational wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In 2022 Render increased their prices (which for my team worked out at a doubling of costs) with a one month notice period and the CEO's response to me when I asked him if he thought that was a fair notice period was that it was operationally necessary and he was sorry to see us go.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#299

Post by seyz »

It's too late. I loved Heroku, but having 5+ major outages in a single year was unacceptable. The support was abysmal, and transparency was non-existent. After the Salesforce acquisition, we watched the company culture shift, getting worse and worse over the years. We were forced to migrate to AWS. Even though we were high-spend customers, the trust is gone. This post is a nice gesture of transparency, but it's way too fluffy for my taste. Heroku is dead to me, there’s no coming back from this.

Re: An Update on Heroku

#300

Post by kayo_20211030 »

It was such a great product.

Yes, I know they had one truly horrible year. But, they righted the ship.

I worked for a company that ran 10bn in revenue, with thousands of users, and Heroku just hummed along. It ran our business.

The benefit to us was the lack of problems that occurred at deploy time. Heroku's orchestration of removing old dynos, adding new dynos, and their network control was spectacular. DB's were updated, or patched, without downtime. It truly was impressive.

We moved to a combination of AWS and on-prem, and the overhead of providing what Heroku previously provided is quite large.

I'll remember it fondly, and miss it a bit too.

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