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As someone that was there at Heroku after the acquisition, I don't think you can state that since the acquisition it's been consistently downhill. There isn't m

As someone that was there at Heroku after the acquisition, I don't think you can state that since the acquisition it's been consistently downhill. There isn't much debate that things have stagnated in the last 5-7 years which is a longer story on why probably. Some examples of innovation that happened and were launched after the acquisition: buildpacks (at the time of acquisition Heroku was still Ruby only), Heroku Postgres launched forks/followers/dataclips all after the acquisition, review apps came several years after. Salesforce may have had an eventual hand in it, but there was still a lot of innovation happening due to the folks there in the near to mid-term after the acquisition for several years. All that said, very excited for the new crop of players in the space. There are a number of companies trying to be a cheaper or more stable Heroku. Personally I'm excited about the ones that are taking their own unique approach. https://www.fly.io https://www.fly.io and https://www.railway.app https://www.railway.app are two that to me seem to bring their own perspective vs. just trying to recreate Heroku as a carbon copy clone. There are a number more in the jamstack space that have become staples such as Netlify and Vercel which are also doing great things.

booi 5y ago
https://render.com https://render.com is my favorite in this space
- bravura 5y ago
  Care to explain why you like these choices?
  - kjksf 5y ago
    I can only speak about render.com as I use for a mix of 10 static websites / Go webapps + cloudflare for DNS and caching proxy. It sounds prosaic but "it just works". Specifically compared to Digital Ocean Apps (which I used before render): * the dashboard UI is better designed and faster * the builds and deployments happen faster * similar price (to Digital Ocean, much cheaper than Heroku) * similar capabilities (attached disks, hosted Postgres, hosted redis) but the velocity seems better i.e. render.com seems to implement features faster than DO You would think that "well designed dashboard that displays instantly" would be a table stakes in an offering like that, but sadly it isn't.
  - o_m 5y ago
    This article compares the two: https://render.com/render-vs-heroku-comparison https://render.com/render-vs-heroku-comparison
- qrush 5y ago
  I recently moved some apps over to Render and I've been loving it so far. Ease of use with Heroku with some "infrastructure as code" style YAMLs (they're called blueprints). Performance is about the same and cost nearly halved.
- a_chris 5y ago
  I'm trying to switch from Heroku to Render but it is awfully slow compared to Heroku, my Rails project takes something like 1 minute to start after it has been shut down gratefully. Moreover, it breaks the CSS assets and uses the older assets instead of the latest ones. I do not why, it is a really small project and I have none of these issue on Heroku
  - anurag 5y ago
    Sorry about that. It sounds like you're on the free plan which is somewhat underpowered vs Heroku right now. Still, definitely not the experience we hope to provide and I'd love to learn more. Email in profile.
    - BarryMilo 5y ago
      Dumb question I couldn't quickly glean from the website, does Render integrate well with gitlab-ci? Also while I have you, do you support deploying to Canadian regions? Thanks!
      - anurag 5y ago
        Render integrates with Gitlab repos, and you can use deploy hooks from any CI provider (including gitlab-ci): https://render.com/docs/deploy-hooks https://render.com/docs/deploy-hooks We don't have a Canadian region yet, but we'll get there!
        BarryMilo 5y ago
        Thanks!
- rychco 5y ago
  How does render compare to Netlify? They seem fairly similar.
  - bpicolo 5y ago
    More backend focus - databases, cron, backend apps - while keeping the netlify-experience frontend goal
spaniard89277 5y ago
https://scalingo.com/ https://scalingo.com/ is nice too
- js4ever 5y ago
  not really, it's available only in france and it's crazy expensive, we are talking about 115€/month for a container with 4gb of ram, so large that the offer is named 2XL. Wow now 2cpu/4GB of ram is considered 2XL
  - WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
    I like caprover more.
barkerja 5y ago
We're big users of Heroku Connect, which has been an incredible product for our use.
- njudah 5y ago
  As the co-creator of Heroku Connect (originally Cloudconnect), thanks! Its been amazing to watch that space mature in the 11 years since we started that effort, especially with the new crop of reverse ETL vendors.
simonw 5y ago
The first few years after the Salesforce acquisition were incredible - for quite a while I thought of Heroku as one of the best examples of an acquisiton where the product improved after the release. Sad to see that momentum eventually fade away.
- petenixey 5y ago
  Agreed - not least recruiting Matz which I thought was a huge coup
  - craigkerstiens 5y ago
    At the time we would joke a bit that acquisitions would get some new very high priced domain. We even looked at getting the .app TLD for all Heroku apps to get their own .app domain. We ended up with our acquisition "gift" as Matz, which was great to see it support Ruby and the community given how Heroku couldn't have become Heroku without the Ruby and Rails community.
    - debaserab2 5y ago
      When you hire a celebrity programmer like that, what exactly do they end up doing? Do they actually have responsibilities in their role or is it more just to slap the branding on to them while they continue to do their own thing, whatever it may be? (in Matz case I would think he has more than enough full time work on Ruby itself)
      - bgentry 5y ago
        Heroku/Salesforce essentially just picked up the salaries for Matz and part of his team to work on Ruby, with no other commitments as far as I'm aware.
mrkurt 5y ago
I think the most interesting part of this is the PaaS disaggregation. Heroku built an exceptionally good Postgres service. They could not have done that with multiple DBs. Even their redis is pretty meh. People like us (Fly.io) will end up either building very mediocre DB offerings or collaborating with DB companies (like yours: https://www.crunchydata.com/products/crunchy-bridge/ https://www.crunchydata.com/products/crunchy-bridge/) to ship stuff that's substantially better than RDS. I'm looking forward to it. Down with mediocre DB services.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  I'm curious about what "substantially better than RDS" means. RDS has been good enough for me for quite a while. Does it only matter once you get to a certain scale?
  - craigkerstiens 5y ago
    Craig here from Crunchy the company he's referring to. Not sure what he has in mind, but having built a lot of Heroku Postgres in the early days I definitely have thoughts on what can make a database great. There is a big gap between most developers and what you need to know to efficiently run Postgres. Without tipping too much of our hand, we're focused deeply on building an amazing developer experience for Postgres. Some things we're thinking about are how we can actively detect N+1 queries (common in almost every ORM, Rails, Django, etc) and notify you about them. We already have some big differences like shipping with connection pooling built-in so you can easily scale to 10,000s of connections, really any production Postgres setup should be running with pgbouncer, where as on a lot of providers it's either not an option or you're left to your own devices. Good enough may be absolutely fine for a lot of people, but no lock-in to a single cloud, better developer tooling, proactive alerts and recommendations, quality support all feel like an opportunity to be better. Kurt may have entirely other things in mind, and would be all ears if there is low hanging fruit in terms of feature or experience we can do to make Postgres even better for folks.
    - glenngillen 5y ago
phendrenad2 5y ago
> at the time of acquisition Heroku was still Ruby only Uhhh... I don't think that's true. There were 3rd party buildpacks available.
- jbeynon 5y ago
  (Another ex Heroku person here) At the time of acquisiton (Dec 2010) the Bamboo stack was the only GA stack, Cedar was in beta which used buildpacks internally but custom buildpacks didn't come to 2012 https://blog.heroku.com/buildpacks https://blog.heroku.com/buildpacks
neya 5y ago
I wouldn't straight out recommend fly.io. See, part of Heroku's value proposition was their excellent support. I had asked fly.io to delete my account since there wasn't a provision to delete it from their interface and they never bothered to reply and put me in some kind of shadow ban from re-registering with my email. I mean if this is how you're going to treat your customers, then good luck! I'm yet to try out railway.app and..looks interesting to say the least.

booi 5y ago

https://render.com https://render.com is my favorite in this space

bravura 5y ago
Care to explain why you like these choices?
- kjksf 5y ago
  I can only speak about render.com as I use for a mix of 10 static websites / Go webapps + cloudflare for DNS and caching proxy. It sounds prosaic but "it just works". Specifically compared to Digital Ocean Apps (which I used before render): * the dashboard UI is better designed and faster * the builds and deployments happen faster * similar price (to Digital Ocean, much cheaper than Heroku) * similar capabilities (attached disks, hosted Postgres, hosted redis) but the velocity seems better i.e. render.com seems to implement features faster than DO You would think that "well designed dashboard that displays instantly" would be a table stakes in an offering like that, but sadly it isn't.
- o_m 5y ago
  This article compares the two: https://render.com/render-vs-heroku-comparison https://render.com/render-vs-heroku-comparison
qrush 5y ago
I recently moved some apps over to Render and I've been loving it so far. Ease of use with Heroku with some "infrastructure as code" style YAMLs (they're called blueprints). Performance is about the same and cost nearly halved.
a_chris 5y ago
I'm trying to switch from Heroku to Render but it is awfully slow compared to Heroku, my Rails project takes something like 1 minute to start after it has been shut down gratefully. Moreover, it breaks the CSS assets and uses the older assets instead of the latest ones. I do not why, it is a really small project and I have none of these issue on Heroku
- anurag 5y ago
  Sorry about that. It sounds like you're on the free plan which is somewhat underpowered vs Heroku right now. Still, definitely not the experience we hope to provide and I'd love to learn more. Email in profile.
  - BarryMilo 5y ago
    Dumb question I couldn't quickly glean from the website, does Render integrate well with gitlab-ci? Also while I have you, do you support deploying to Canadian regions? Thanks!
    - anurag 5y ago
      Render integrates with Gitlab repos, and you can use deploy hooks from any CI provider (including gitlab-ci): https://render.com/docs/deploy-hooks https://render.com/docs/deploy-hooks We don't have a Canadian region yet, but we'll get there!
      - BarryMilo 5y ago
        Thanks!
rychco 5y ago
How does render compare to Netlify? They seem fairly similar.
- bpicolo 5y ago
  More backend focus - databases, cron, backend apps - while keeping the netlify-experience frontend goal

spaniard89277 5y ago

https://scalingo.com/ https://scalingo.com/ is nice too

js4ever 5y ago
not really, it's available only in france and it's crazy expensive, we are talking about 115€/month for a container with 4gb of ram, so large that the offer is named 2XL. Wow now 2cpu/4GB of ram is considered 2XL
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  I like caprover more.

barkerja 5y ago

We're big users of Heroku Connect, which has been an incredible product for our use.

njudah 5y ago
As the co-creator of Heroku Connect (originally Cloudconnect), thanks! Its been amazing to watch that space mature in the 11 years since we started that effort, especially with the new crop of reverse ETL vendors.

simonw 5y ago

The first few years after the Salesforce acquisition were incredible - for quite a while I thought of Heroku as one of the best examples of an acquisiton where the product improved after the release. Sad to see that momentum eventually fade away.

petenixey 5y ago
Agreed - not least recruiting Matz which I thought was a huge coup
- craigkerstiens 5y ago
  At the time we would joke a bit that acquisitions would get some new very high priced domain. We even looked at getting the .app TLD for all Heroku apps to get their own .app domain. We ended up with our acquisition "gift" as Matz, which was great to see it support Ruby and the community given how Heroku couldn't have become Heroku without the Ruby and Rails community.
  - debaserab2 5y ago
    When you hire a celebrity programmer like that, what exactly do they end up doing? Do they actually have responsibilities in their role or is it more just to slap the branding on to them while they continue to do their own thing, whatever it may be? (in Matz case I would think he has more than enough full time work on Ruby itself)
    - bgentry 5y ago
      Heroku/Salesforce essentially just picked up the salaries for Matz and part of his team to work on Ruby, with no other commitments as far as I'm aware.

mrkurt 5y ago

I think the most interesting part of this is the PaaS disaggregation. Heroku built an exceptionally good Postgres service. They could not have done that with multiple DBs. Even their redis is pretty meh. People like us (Fly.io) will end up either building very mediocre DB offerings or collaborating with DB companies (like yours: https://www.crunchydata.com/products/crunchy-bridge/ https://www.crunchydata.com/products/crunchy-bridge/) to ship stuff that's substantially better than RDS. I'm looking forward to it. Down with mediocre DB services.

mwcampbell 5y ago
I'm curious about what "substantially better than RDS" means. RDS has been good enough for me for quite a while. Does it only matter once you get to a certain scale?
- craigkerstiens 5y ago
  Craig here from Crunchy the company he's referring to. Not sure what he has in mind, but having built a lot of Heroku Postgres in the early days I definitely have thoughts on what can make a database great. There is a big gap between most developers and what you need to know to efficiently run Postgres. Without tipping too much of our hand, we're focused deeply on building an amazing developer experience for Postgres. Some things we're thinking about are how we can actively detect N+1 queries (common in almost every ORM, Rails, Django, etc) and notify you about them. We already have some big differences like shipping with connection pooling built-in so you can easily scale to 10,000s of connections, really any production Postgres setup should be running with pgbouncer, where as on a lot of providers it's either not an option or you're left to your own devices. Good enough may be absolutely fine for a lot of people, but no lock-in to a single cloud, better developer tooling, proactive alerts and recommendations, quality support all feel like an opportunity to be better. Kurt may have entirely other things in mind, and would be all ears if there is low hanging fruit in terms of feature or experience we can do to make Postgres even better for folks.
  - glenngillen 5y ago

phendrenad2 5y ago

> at the time of acquisition Heroku was still Ruby only Uhhh... I don't think that's true. There were 3rd party buildpacks available.

jbeynon 5y ago
(Another ex Heroku person here) At the time of acquisiton (Dec 2010) the Bamboo stack was the only GA stack, Cedar was in beta which used buildpacks internally but custom buildpacks didn't come to 2012 https://blog.heroku.com/buildpacks https://blog.heroku.com/buildpacks

neya 5y ago

I wouldn't straight out recommend fly.io. See, part of Heroku's value proposition was their excellent support. I had asked fly.io to delete my account since there wasn't a provision to delete it from their interface and they never bothered to reply and put me in some kind of shadow ban from re-registering with my email. I mean if this is how you're going to treat your customers, then good luck! I'm yet to try out railway.app and..looks interesting to say the least.