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Why did Heroku fail?

matt-rickard.com

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Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#51

Post by hthrowaway5 »

throwawaysfdc wrote: post #9
bastawhiz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have not pushed out any notable updates in a long time, bugs have remained unfixed for many years, customer support is unhelpful. All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left, the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce. It's a zombie of a company. The product and pricing are pretty good for small projects, but almost everyone outgrows Heroku well before they transition from "small" to "…

> the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce This is definitely false. Though some internal apps are deployed on Heroku, it is not the primary deployment target for new projects. Heroku staff work on Heroku. Salesforce has a large internal infra program and team that has no overlap with Heroku. past codename projects have been proposed to change this, but none have ever come to be.

(Former Herokai) It is definitely not false but you misunderstood what they meant.

You understood it as running sfdc code on Heroku which is not happening—but was proposed as part of Shinrai (a failed project). What has happened is many if not most Heroku employees have moved away from working on Heroku and are now working on Salesforce Functions aka Evergreen.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#52

Post by tootie »

glenngillen wrote: post #48

I was a relatively early Heroku employee, though still technically started _after_ the acquisition. I've spent the much of the last 10 years hoping that I once again get to be part of such a failure. It's such a rare opportunity to work with an amazing team of talented people who set a new standard for what a great developer experience is, how simple it should be to run containerized workloads, that a robust build pi…

People still use it as a benchmark. I see products marketed like "Heroku for mobile apps" and the like. It's the gold standard for PaaS even when it doesn't work.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#53

Post by stevenharman »

sodality2 wrote: post #35
stevenharman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Is it a bad idea to post this under your full name? Edit: Above content was expletive-laden sentence against anyone who dares insult Heroku

As the author, I disagree. It was an expletive-laden sentence against anyone who dares insult the hard working, dedicated, caring, compassionate, and very talented folks who work tirelessly behind the scenes to make Heroku a reality.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#54

Post by hthrowaway5 »

craigkerstiens wrote: post #31
bastawhiz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have not pushed out any notable updates in a long time, bugs have remained unfixed for many years, customer support is unhelpful. All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left, the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce. It's a zombie of a company. The product and pricing are pretty good for small projects, but almost everyone outgrows Heroku well before they transition from "small" to "…

This is a bad take without much internal context. Heroku is not thriving as it stands today. It takes a lot just to run Heroku and the engineers still around care deeply around it. I'm excited for a lot of the new offerings like Fly and Railway, but they aren't operating at the same scale as Heroku. It does feel like there continues to be a fading at a leadership level about developer experience and what it means. Th…

(Former Herokai) Heroku is beyond the point of recovery at this point (barring a sale to Github or something). Those dedicated engineers need to give up because at this point they're harming everyone:

* The industry – suffering because Heroku holds market share that should go to competitors capable of innovating.

* Customers – suffering because their platform will die but their vendor isn't being transparent about that fact.

* Herokai – suffering because they could be doing something better with their careers, even if it is on another sfdc product.

Make sunset plans now and let customers know what the timeline will look like. "Trust is the #1 value" at sfdc, right?

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#55

Post by zoomzoom »

First - as others have done, I think we have to challenge the premise that Heroku failed. It's still the gold standard 15 years later and the default for many knowledgable folks.

Obviously given the hype around k8s and the order of magnitude difference between the success of the hyperscalers and the scale of Heroku, there's some mismatch btetween what they did and the potential they had. I would say the same about App Engine and AWS's various iterations starting with Elastic Beanstalk.

Overall if we had to bucket the opportunity that still exists to do better in the space, I think it aligned with wrong product and something better than "git push heroku" better than with business model, whole product, or timing (which clearly had a role). Business model is an issue but not against stuff like render, the success of which also pushes against whole product (people are still adopting something very similar).

Agree with craigkerstiens that the next iteration is about apps vs. services, extensibility, and blending different service types (frontend/container/serverless/data) more fully than Heroku (which really only has one type of app) was able to. And is also about lifecycle and SDLC completeness (which helps a lot with security and compliance, too).

As I mention on all these Heroku threads lately, I'm the cofounder of Coherence (www.withcoherence.com) where I think we're taking an interesting stab at what the future looks like here, using first principles to go deeper than other PaaS and integrate dev more deeply, along with more support for extensibility.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#56

Post by hthrowaway5 »

mfer wrote: post #24

Did Heroku fail? Heroku was the biggest in a long line of developer tools. The PaaS and now FaaS models are still alive and well. A lot of developers want them. I know people are hot on containers and k8s but devs, who need to focus on code and business logic, have poorer productivity when they have to shift into thinking about ops. Heroku inspired a lot including direct competitors (like Cloud Foundry). A lot of mon…

* They seemingly can't recover from this GitHub debacle (it's been a month without GitHub Sync).

* They had a massive security breach where core-db was breached. Hashed user passwords and encrypted env vars were leaked. (And a hell of a lot more I bet—but they haven't admitted this)

* They're operating with probably 1/3 the staff they were at peak due to attrition with no backfill and a layoff.

* They've been under a feature freeze for going on 5 years. Check Heroku Changelog to verify this yourself: https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog

Yes: Heroku failed.

EDIT: just because Heroku has failed in 2022 doesn't mean it wasn't also successful. It's not too different than Flash in that respect.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#57

Post by iratewizard »

dfcowell wrote: post #46
pan69 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the elephant in the room then; why did Salesforce buy Heroku? I mean: > From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products > I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?

Salesforce bought Heroku in the early days of the “Salesforce Platform” product era. I wouldn’t be surprised if Heroku tech underpins a big chunk of the AppExchange developer experience.

There might be less than you would think. Salesforce's security review does not take kindly to having executable portions of your managed package live outside of their stringent security process. That isn't too say it doesn't happen. But you have to make a case for it being critical.

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#58

Post by [deleted] »

tootie wrote: post #52
glenngillen wrote: post #48

I was a relatively early Heroku employee, though still technically started _after_ the acquisition. I've spent the much of the last 10 years hoping that I once again get to be part of such a failure. It's such a rare opportunity to work with an amazing team of talented people who set a new standard for what a great developer experience is, how simple it should be to run containerized workloads, that a robust build pi…

People still use it as a benchmark. I see products marketed like "Heroku for mobile apps" and the like. It's the gold standard for PaaS even when it doesn't work.

[deleted]

Re: Why did Heroku fail?

#59

Post by mbesto »

pan69 wrote: post #27
tschellenbach wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition

Isn't the elephant in the room then; why did Salesforce buy Heroku? I mean: > From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products > I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?

> What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?

I've seen companies who build on Force.com use it for and then integrate it against. They have an interesting (albeit not sure if it ever got fully fleshed out) bi-directional DB sync between SFDC and Heroku Postgres, which to me is the killer app for integration.

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