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Good article. I would say Heroku’s problem is that developers are comfortable with more operational complexity now, fifteen years later, than when it launched.

Good article. I would say Heroku’s problem is that developers are comfortable with more operational complexity now, fifteen years later, than when it launched. Much of this credit, of course, goes to AWS. Heroku serves an abstraction level that appeals to a smaller share of developers. It has also not grown beyond the Ruby world as much as was hoped for, as indicated by the mention of the Java ecosystem.

itsjustme2 6y ago
I use it pretty heavily for node.js apps. Every time I see the newest Rube Goldberg contraption for deploying code, my first thought is trying to figure out why they didn't do something simpler, like Heroku. Being comfortable with complexity isn't a good excuse for making things more complex than they need to be.
- macando 6y ago
  > Every time I see the newest Rube Goldberg contraption for deploying code, my first thought is trying to figure out why they didn't do something simpler, like Heroku. Same here. After dealing with complexity of building an app the last thing you want is more complexity. And this time of a kind you're not comfortable with. Obviously a lot of people were ready to pay to Heroku to hide that kind of complexity from them.
ritchiea 6y ago
Possibly but particuarly on a small team there is a cost to operational complexity even if you're comfortable. If the team could be developing features but is dealing with an infrastructure problem that could easily be dealt with via an abstraction layer then you still lose overall developer productivity. And Heroku was never a great solution once you reached a reasonable level of scale because it became expensive and your Heroku infrastructure became subject to unexpected issues in resource sharing within shared instances. Shared instances are a problem across all cloud providers but pure-AWS-sans-Heroku is easier and has more options to switch to private instances.
chii 6y ago
> developers are comfortable with more operational complexity developers should never be comfortable with operational complexity. It's like saying javascript is a good language because you got used to the quirks and warts.

itsjustme2 6y ago

I use it pretty heavily for node.js apps. Every time I see the newest Rube Goldberg contraption for deploying code, my first thought is trying to figure out why they didn't do something simpler, like Heroku. Being comfortable with complexity isn't a good excuse for making things more complex than they need to be.

macando 6y ago
> Every time I see the newest Rube Goldberg contraption for deploying code, my first thought is trying to figure out why they didn't do something simpler, like Heroku. Same here. After dealing with complexity of building an app the last thing you want is more complexity. And this time of a kind you're not comfortable with. Obviously a lot of people were ready to pay to Heroku to hide that kind of complexity from them.

ritchiea 6y ago

Possibly but particuarly on a small team there is a cost to operational complexity even if you're comfortable. If the team could be developing features but is dealing with an infrastructure problem that could easily be dealt with via an abstraction layer then you still lose overall developer productivity. And Heroku was never a great solution once you reached a reasonable level of scale because it became expensive and your Heroku infrastructure became subject to unexpected issues in resource sharing within shared instances. Shared instances are a problem across all cloud providers but pure-AWS-sans-Heroku is easier and has more options to switch to private instances.

chii 6y ago

> developers are comfortable with more operational complexity developers should never be comfortable with operational complexity. It's like saying javascript is a good language because you got used to the quirks and warts.