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Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

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Re: Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

#91

Post by olefoo »

gregd wrote: post #89
olefoo wrote: post #69

I'm not Heroku's biggest fan, and haven't used it for more than a couple of one-off fiddles to play with the platform. But, my sympathy is going to them, because what I see coming from Rap Genius looks like classic blame-game. So a vendors documentation was unclear and your server sucked publicly for some time? Shameful. You didn't know about it because you expected your vendors to give you extra hand-holding? That's…

I'm having a hard time understanding your justification for your sympathy going to Heroku. RG is paying for PaaS from Heroku based on documentation, sales pitches, etc. They're also paying good money for the tools necessary to make business decisions based on data collected from that PaaS. Just given the realm of customer service, why wouldn't you expect "hand-holding" from your vendor? Why is it unreasonable to have…

To take an analogy from another field that, this is like a cinematographer getting bent out of shape and angry at the camera leasing company because he used a film stock his camera wasn't correctly calibrated for. From what I've read about it, it sounds like the setup on the servers had some issues that made the queue time issue into a problem where it wouldn't necessarily be for another, or even most other, customers. If you are or want to be, known as a technical company, that means you have to take responsibility for your mistakes, even if your mistake was thinking that the vendor was going to catch and fix all the mistakes and bugs in the service that they are providing to you. Building web services that are performant, stable and economical is hard work; you can't take your eye off the ball, and you can't just blindly hope that vendors will take care of your shit for you, you have to know what you're buying, and what you should be getting.

And, if you're going to go public with your complaints, it's best to do so in an understated, fact based manner. In this case, Rap Genius comes off like a guy screaming at the waiter in a fancy restaurant. They may be displeased, they may even be right about the choucroutes en sel being salted cabbage; but lot's of people around think they're making an ass of themselves.

Re: Rap Genius (YC S11) responds to Heroku’s call for ‘respect’

#92

Post by spronkey »

I'm astounded at the number of "$60k hires a good sysadmin and some EC2 resources" comments. You guys clearly don't understand exactly what Heroku (or a similar service) offers - providing it works.

There's a concept called a Bus Factor. Basically, it's the number of people who, if hit by a bus and made otherwise unusable, it would take to completely rail your business.

With $60k spent on a single sysadmin and an army of EC2, that's a pretty effing small bus factor - 1. So... that one guy gets taken out of action, and they're more or less toast? Yeah, no. Heroku gives them a massive bus factor for perhaps a little bit more money than it would take to cheap it themselves. It's a cheap way to avert risk.

They're probably at the size now where they could handle taking it in-house, but you've still then got to factor in hiring, developing the procedures for ops inhouse etc., and migrating. It's not easy to just flip the switch.

In any case, Heroku's behaviour is pretty shoddy. Though, knowing how much of a pain documentation is, I'm not surprised. I don't think they realised just how bad the change from intelligent to random routing actually was - and didn't treat it as such. This is giving them benefit of doubt though, because the other option is that they didn't publicise it precisely because they knew how bad it is. Scary thought.

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