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Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

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Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#81

Post by zcrar70 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #75
OGinparadise wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The overlawyered US is the richest and most powerful country on Earth by a country mile." Thanks to the lawyers, no doubt. I am sure you didn't meant to say that if we pass some tort reform and limit some nonsense lawsuits (IP, malpractice etc) the country will lose it's wealth /power rank.

The rule of law is a key part of the mix of institutions, geography, culture and luck that have made the USA the richest country that has ever been. And with the rule of law comes lawyers. I know it's fashionable to hate lawyers, but they're a necessary profession. Law is a field in which small details can have very large consequences once the full line of reasoning is unfolded. Because of the importance of exhaustiv…

Not all that is a part of the US is a reason for its success. Whilst the US does a lot of things well, there is always room for improvement, and some of the aspects of its legal framework is one of the areas that could benefit. The US spends 2-3 times as much on tort as other developed economies; this is clearly a problem, not an advantage.

For more examples, see: http://www.economist.com/node/21541423 - on attempts to reform tort law

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571141-cheaper-legal... - on how US legal education can be reformed to reduce the cost of legal counsel

http://www.economist.com/node/18389167 - on problems with the US' patent laws

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#82

Post by notahacker »

jacques_chester wrote: post #75
OGinparadise wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The overlawyered US is the richest and most powerful country on Earth by a country mile." Thanks to the lawyers, no doubt. I am sure you didn't meant to say that if we pass some tort reform and limit some nonsense lawsuits (IP, malpractice etc) the country will lose it's wealth /power rank.

The rule of law is a key part of the mix of institutions, geography, culture and luck that have made the USA the richest country that has ever been. And with the rule of law comes lawyers. I know it's fashionable to hate lawyers, but they're a necessary profession. Law is a field in which small details can have very large consequences once the full line of reasoning is unfolded. Because of the importance of exhaustiv…

Let's be honest, it isn't this firm's legal duty to set up a marketing website to try to find a plaintiff to launch a lucrative lawsuit. Law firms seek to offer the level of service that maximises their returns, just like any other corporation.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#83

Post by [deleted] »

jacques_chester wrote: post #72
OGinparadise wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, other developed countries are all going downhill for not being overlawyered up like in US. It's a system set by lawyers for lawyers so of course you need a lawyer more than in many other countries. "Everyone" sues over everything

The overlawyered US is the richest and most powerful country on Earth by a country mile.

[deleted]

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#84

Post by res0nat0r »

jacques_chester wrote: post #69
res0nat0r wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By misrepresents you mean that the end users didn't exactly understand how underlying architecture worked, didn't like the performance, but kept using the service anyway. If every customer I dealt with while working on the EC2 platform could sue because they didn't understand how every technical detail of AWS worked and they couldn't optimize for it...well there would be more lawyers employed by Jeff Bezos than engin…

The problem is that Heroku made claims about their architecture and subsequent performance characteristics that were flatly untrue. The further problem it looks as if they knew the claims were untrue. These are not matters of internal consideration. They cut directly to the heart of the Heroku marketing material: "Write for our platform, our expensive secret sauce will make your stuff linearly scalable." In which cas…

The same can be said for EC2. "Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change."

If my instances don't launch "quickly" or I've designed my app in such a way that it isn't 100% linery scalable I can now sue Amazon? You can't sue heroku for their marketing speak.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#85

Post by res0nat0r »

Karunamon wrote: post #80
res0nat0r wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By misrepresents you mean that the end users didn't exactly understand how underlying architecture worked, didn't like the performance, but kept using the service anyway. If every customer I dealt with while working on the EC2 platform could sue because they didn't understand how every technical detail of AWS worked and they couldn't optimize for it...well there would be more lawyers employed by Jeff Bezos than engin…

>By misrepresents you mean that the end users didn't exactly understand how underlying architecture worked Uh.. no. Heroku claimed to use intelligent routing, they used random routing. And then covered it up with their monitoring tools. How in the name of crap can you blame this on the user?! Did you even read the Rap Genius writeup on this problem? If I were in their position, I would be utterly livid.

I read the article. I wouldn't call it "covering up". It didn't explain everything going on, just like all kinds of things that go on behind the scenes everyday at AWS that users don't understand.

Define "intelligent routing". Maybe it is intelligent to route 85% of your requests to /dev/null. Can you sue because your performance sucks in your application use case? Most normal people eval their provider, try to get answers from support (which rapgenius have done here), and if the answers aren't up to snuff or the performance isn't whay they think it should be for what they are paying they move to another provider. They don't sue their provider for being "slow".

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#86

Post by rdl »

chacham15 wrote: post #57
rdl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even people who have been somewhat screwed by this issue with Heroku tend to love Heroku; Salesforce could make this right with generous payouts to affected people and 2-6mo of engineering to offer a better load balancer as a service (Actually, I think I could build this as a third party provider, even) EA is basically a lost cause; their business model and culture is the problem. Having better sacks at Dachau wouldn…

> Actually, I think I could build this as a third party provider, even I dont use Heroku, but if you read Rap Genius' original paper discussing the queuing problem, they specifically stated that there is nothing that they can do about it.

RG couldn't do anything while using Heroku's load balancing infrastructure (well, other than rewriting their app to be more constant in performance).

A third-party could do a load balancer entirely outside of Heroku or even AWS, feeding sessions in based on feedback from the application ("intelligent routing"). Heroku even offers a way to bill for that kind of thing. You can open outgoing connections from each dyno and then load-balance over that.

Doing it with ELB would be possible I think, but I don't really like AWS ELB. I think it would make the most sense to do near US-East AWS, but arguably a CDN type service could do it from many locations. Being closer to users (as long as your connectivity to US-East/Heroku is still good) helps performance more.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#87

Post by Karunamon »

res0nat0r wrote: post #84
jacques_chester wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Heroku made claims about their architecture and subsequent performance characteristics that were flatly untrue. The further problem it looks as if they knew the claims were untrue. These are not matters of internal consideration. They cut directly to the heart of the Heroku marketing material: "Write for our platform, our expensive secret sauce will make your stuff linearly scalable." In which cas…

The same can be said for EC2. "Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change." If my instances don't launch "quickly" or I've designed my app in such a way that it isn't 100% linery scalable I can now sue Amazon? You can't sue heroku for their marketing speak.

>You can't sue heroku for their marketing speak.

You can sue anyone for anything, success is not assured.

That bit of pedantry aside, Heroku led people on to believe that their queueing backend was intelligently distributing requests to nodes. Rather than randomly.

You are not allowed to argue this, as Heroku themselves acknowledged it!

Furthermore, they blatantly lied about it. From the rap genius article:

Heroku claims that though they received reports of unexplained latency over the past couple of years, they weren’t able to figure out the request queuing issue until they read the Rap Genius article. But there is evidence that Heroku knew about the problem for more than 2 years.

And the conclusion, also from the same article:

Based on Heroku's response so far, it appears their approach to fixing the problem is, “We promised you intelligent routing, we delivered random routing (which is worse than intelligent routing), so we're going to change our documentation to make it clear that we're only promising you random routing.”

This works for future customers, since once Heroku makes these documentation changes, everyone who signs up will understand exactly how routing works. But it does nothing to address the time and money that existing customers have spent over the past few years. What does Heroku owe them?

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#88

Post by res0nat0r »

Karunamon wrote: post #87
res0nat0r wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same can be said for EC2. "Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change." If my instances don't launch "quickly" or I've designed my app in such a way that it isn't 100% linery scalable I can now sue Amazon? You can't sue heroku for their marketing speak.

>You can't sue heroku for their marketing speak. You can sue anyone for anything, success is not assured. That bit of pedantry aside, Heroku led people on to believe that their queueing backend was intelligently distributing requests to nodes. Rather than randomly. You are not allowed to argue this, as Heroku themselves acknowledged it! Furthermore, they blatantly lied about it . From the rap genius article: Heroku c…

Who's to say random routing doesn't qualify as "intelligent"? What if random routing is the most efficient routing schema for 99% of their users? Trying to sue because "intelligent" doesn't mean what you think it means isn't going to be very successful.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#89

Post by [deleted] »

Karunamon wrote: post #87
res0nat0r wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same can be said for EC2. "Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change." If my instances don't launch "quickly" or I've designed my app in such a way that it isn't 100% linery scalable I can now sue Amazon? You can't sue heroku for their marketing speak.

>You can't sue heroku for their marketing speak. You can sue anyone for anything, success is not assured. That bit of pedantry aside, Heroku led people on to believe that their queueing backend was intelligently distributing requests to nodes. Rather than randomly. You are not allowed to argue this, as Heroku themselves acknowledged it! Furthermore, they blatantly lied about it . From the rap genius article: Heroku c…

[deleted]

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#90

Post by Karunamon »

res0nat0r wrote: post #88
Karunamon wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can't sue heroku for their marketing speak. You can sue anyone for anything, success is not assured. That bit of pedantry aside, Heroku led people on to believe that their queueing backend was intelligently distributing requests to nodes. Rather than randomly. You are not allowed to argue this, as Heroku themselves acknowledged it! Furthermore, they blatantly lied about it . From the rap genius article: Heroku c…

Who's to say random routing doesn't qualify as "intelligent"? What if random routing is the most efficient routing schema for 99% of their users? Trying to sue because "intelligent" doesn't mean what you think it means isn't going to be very successful.

>Who's to say random routing doesn't qualify as "intelligent"?

Heroku themselves!

Again, they changed their documentation.

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