Gitlab has been trying to be a PaaS for years, but seems to subscribe to the “add more shiny features” school of product design rather than addressing the funda

Gitlab has been trying to be a PaaS for years, but seems to subscribe to the “add more shiny features” school of product design rather than addressing the fundamental workflow of Heroku or Cloud Foundry. They are also being incredibly trite when they say “Do not use Heroku”, which is not at all the point of that Twitter thread, it’s a cheap way to push your own product. The point Adam was making (which I don’t entirely agree with) was that we (the broader industry building PaaS features on Kubernetes - eg. Knative, others) are all chasing a design target from 2012 that he thinks is a dead end, and we should be trying new things. I think the issue is less about the failure of Heroku as a design target than a failure to commodify the infrastructure it takes to get to Heroku-like ease of use. In other words, people like Heroku (or Cloud Foundry) but large market segments don’t want to pay for it. So we need to bring the price down by commodifying the tech. Long run it would be nice to simplify broader classes of apps than “12 factor apps” (and indeed, I’ve seen “3 or 4 factor apps” run on these platforms), but for anyone that have seen the enormous productivity gains of those platforms, especially in a large company, it seems we still have a lot of low hanging fruit we can address.