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> 2. Customers sign up at "heroku.com", the platform is called "Heroku", the CLI is "heroku", everything's heroku, so don't send emails from a parent company (S

> 2. Customers sign up at "heroku.com", the platform is called "Heroku", the CLI is "heroku", everything's heroku, so don't send emails from a parent company (Salesforce), send them from "Heroku". They're working on something called "Project Periwinkle" that is intended to remove all Heroku branding and make everything Salesforce branded. Periwinkle being a colour between blue (salesforce) and purple (heroku). No more Heroku signups, you'll need a Salesforce account to use it. No more free tier either. Heroku has been in the process of being sunset for years now. New features have been banned for years. Only "keep the lights on" projects are allowed. Not that they could do anything with the skeleton crew they have running the platform. Bob Wise's LinkedIn doesn't even mention Heroku, only Salesforce. Lenora mentions the project here: https://www.lenoraporter.com/portfolio/salesforce https://www.lenoraporter.com/portfolio/salesforce Source: I'm a former employee that left in protest because of this project.

ryantgtg 4y ago
Youch. I have paid apps and free apps (staticman comment processing, and very simple apps I create while following learning tutorials). This project sounds bad! I’ve been slowly exploring alternatives, and was about to abandon my search due to demands on my time. Guess I need to keep exploring.
neximo64 4y ago
The amount of Salesforce fluff in the post is quite palpable. There is a clear lack of control with the leaders in Heroku judging off this post because of the salesforce transition. This project Periwinkle sounds awful. Basically thats the end of using Heroku for us. If it remains like this its something to judge from.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwawa3238273 4y ago
  There really aren't any Heroku leaders anymore. I think anyone director level or higher is Salesforce—not Heroku. It's worth mentioning that this isn't a result of Salesforce acquiring Heroku. That happened 12 years ago when Heroku was next to nothing. Salesforce gets credit for investing in and making Heroku. Why they ultimately have decided to give up on it I have no idea. I hear it's because salespeople had a hard time understanding how to sell it which seems like a strange reason to give up entirely.
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    > because salespeople had a hard time understanding how to sell it which seems like a strange reason to give up entirely. Yet unfortunately from my experience with large orgs and sales, the sales people get all the control and freely shit on the people actually making the software they sell.
  - gonehome 4y ago
    Salesforce is where good software goes to die (or at best become stagnant and lame). Same thing happened to quip and will happen to slack.
    - znpy 4y ago
      I didn't know Slack had been acquired by Salesforce. That's sad, I guess.
    - labster 4y ago
      Oh no! I hope Slack doesn’t become slow and bloated, or go through unnecessary UX redesigns. /s
      - mustardo 4y ago
        MS teams is proof slack could get a lot worse yet :-)
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      Oh man, I somehow missed Slack had been acquired by Salesforce. So many things make sense now!
  - dylan604 4y ago
    >I have no idea. I hear it's because So you had an idea after all?
  - Mandatum 4y ago
    This happens after every single Salesforce acqusition. If you think you're different, compare how many new internal promotions there are, how many senior management have left and how many Salesforce transplants there are. Everyone thought they were the darling child, at least for the first 18 months.
derefr 4y ago
Any suggestions on a rival PaaS that has a similar engineering philosophy to the old Heroku?
- 1propionyl 4y ago
  If you want a more minimal do-it-yourself option you could self-host something like Dokku[1]. [1] https://dokku.com/ https://dokku.com/
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    I feel confident nobody using heroku is doing it because they want a more minimal do-it-yourself option.
- pdwittig 4y ago
  I was a long time Heroku user/lover (~10 years) for both personal and company projects. I've recently moved to Render[1], and so far it's been great. I haven't been using them long enough to put it through it's paces, but I'd certainly say it's worth a look. Other alternatives I've heard good things about are Fly.io[2] and Porter[3]. [1] - https://render.com/ https://render.com/ [2] - https://fly.io/ https://fly.io/ [3] - https://porter.run/ https://porter.run/
  - SonOfLilit 4y ago
    Checked out render.com in the context of side projects that I want on the air but don't expect anyone to ever use (I have so many on heroku, who got rewarded for their generosity with many thousands of dollars of business from me), which means I'm willing to pay a few dollars but not to pay per-app. Looks great except that they delete your free databases after 90 days, making it completely useless for this use case. Their announcement blog post says they plan to remove this limitation "early 2022", but it hadn't happened yet. I next looked at fly.io, which seem ok for the first two apps, assuming they use the same database. If I ever want more than two apps, it seems I will need to start hosting different apps together, which is the opposite of the headache-free experience I'm looking for. Porter runs on my own cloud account, so I can't trust it to not cost too much. Maybe I can get a Kubernetes cluster somewhere (DigitalOcean?) and deploy all my small apps to it, but it sounds like a headache. I'm staying with heroku.
forkfork 4y ago
I work for a non-Heroku tech vendor, and I have always spoken highly of Heroku to my customers from my past experience of going all-in on Heroku, and receiving a top quality of support from Heroku back in 2017-2019. I'm going to point folks to the recent Hacker News threads now. It is difficult for me to understand why Salesforce is not aware of the strength of the Heroku brand among experienced technology workers, and how much they have destroyed that brand in the last 2-3 years.
oxff 4y ago
> [..] No more Heroku signups, you'll need a Salesforce account to use it. No more free tier either. Guess I'm packing it up as I'm no longer seen as target audience (its my hobby project platform) > New features have been banned for years. Only "keep the lights on" projects are allowed. What???
chillfox 4y ago
Well, that’s sad. I guess it’s Fly or Digital Ocean for all future projects then.
- your_username 4y ago
- oxff 4y ago
  There is some comparison of DO's App platform and Google's Cloud offerings here if you are interested (not my blog, just found it helpful: https://blog.verygoodsoftwarenotvirus.ru/posts/greener-cloud-pastures/ https://blog.verygoodsoftwarenotvirus.ru/posts/greener-cloud...)
- gabereiser 4y ago
  Don’t forget render.com
throwawaysfdc 4y ago
Periwinkle never materialized. Neither did Shinrai, or a number of other projects that people brought up in hn threads about this incident. It’s clear that Heroku has lost a ton of great talent and momentum due to questionable business decisions but some of the most controversial fail to ever make it past codename status.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hthrowaway3 4y ago
  It's on ice. As you say it's also not the first time they've attempted something like this. Eventually they'll get there, but customers should know that's the direction. They'll be users of "Compute Cloud" writing APEX instead of Procfiles someday.
  - Mandatum 4y ago
    Remember when Salesforce was moving off of Oracle within 2 years? A decade ago..
    - rhizome 4y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if Larry got them CIA/gov't contracts to avoid anything like that happening.
jrochkind1 4y ago
> New features have been banned for years. Only "keep the lights on" projects are allowed. That's what it's looked like from the outside -- that no features were for whatever reason(s) no longer going to happen. But still dismaying to hear it from the inside in those terms.
- hthrowaway3 4y ago
  You've gotta go way back on the Heroku Changelog to find anything that isn't a language version upgrade or feature removal: https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog I think the feature freeze happened in 2018
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    The interesting thing is that heroku still is so at the top of what it does, as far as developer UX and ease and reliability. It's hard to describe exactly what i mean, but I know plenty of other people agree. Other things do other things better -- but it's only in the past year or two that some things have started to come close or equal. I don't know what's going on exactly. Those who set up heroku for the first ~5 years somehow did such a good job that they could coast for another 5-10 and still stay on top of what they were on top of.

ryantgtg 4y ago

Youch. I have paid apps and free apps (staticman comment processing, and very simple apps I create while following learning tutorials). This project sounds bad! I’ve been slowly exploring alternatives, and was about to abandon my search due to demands on my time. Guess I need to keep exploring.

neximo64 4y ago

The amount of Salesforce fluff in the post is quite palpable. There is a clear lack of control with the leaders in Heroku judging off this post because of the salesforce transition. This project Periwinkle sounds awful. Basically thats the end of using Heroku for us. If it remains like this its something to judge from.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwawa3238273 4y ago
There really aren't any Heroku leaders anymore. I think anyone director level or higher is Salesforce—not Heroku. It's worth mentioning that this isn't a result of Salesforce acquiring Heroku. That happened 12 years ago when Heroku was next to nothing. Salesforce gets credit for investing in and making Heroku. Why they ultimately have decided to give up on it I have no idea. I hear it's because salespeople had a hard time understanding how to sell it which seems like a strange reason to give up entirely.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  > because salespeople had a hard time understanding how to sell it which seems like a strange reason to give up entirely. Yet unfortunately from my experience with large orgs and sales, the sales people get all the control and freely shit on the people actually making the software they sell.
- gonehome 4y ago
  Salesforce is where good software goes to die (or at best become stagnant and lame). Same thing happened to quip and will happen to slack.
  - znpy 4y ago
    I didn't know Slack had been acquired by Salesforce. That's sad, I guess.
  - labster 4y ago
    Oh no! I hope Slack doesn’t become slow and bloated, or go through unnecessary UX redesigns. /s
    - mustardo 4y ago
      MS teams is proof slack could get a lot worse yet :-)
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Oh man, I somehow missed Slack had been acquired by Salesforce. So many things make sense now!
- dylan604 4y ago
  >I have no idea. I hear it's because So you had an idea after all?
- Mandatum 4y ago
  This happens after every single Salesforce acqusition. If you think you're different, compare how many new internal promotions there are, how many senior management have left and how many Salesforce transplants there are. Everyone thought they were the darling child, at least for the first 18 months.

derefr 4y ago

Any suggestions on a rival PaaS that has a similar engineering philosophy to the old Heroku?

1propionyl 4y ago
If you want a more minimal do-it-yourself option you could self-host something like Dokku[1]. [1] https://dokku.com/ https://dokku.com/
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I feel confident nobody using heroku is doing it because they want a more minimal do-it-yourself option.
pdwittig 4y ago
I was a long time Heroku user/lover (~10 years) for both personal and company projects. I've recently moved to Render[1], and so far it's been great. I haven't been using them long enough to put it through it's paces, but I'd certainly say it's worth a look. Other alternatives I've heard good things about are Fly.io[2] and Porter[3]. [1] - https://render.com/ https://render.com/ [2] - https://fly.io/ https://fly.io/ [3] - https://porter.run/ https://porter.run/
- SonOfLilit 4y ago
  Checked out render.com in the context of side projects that I want on the air but don't expect anyone to ever use (I have so many on heroku, who got rewarded for their generosity with many thousands of dollars of business from me), which means I'm willing to pay a few dollars but not to pay per-app. Looks great except that they delete your free databases after 90 days, making it completely useless for this use case. Their announcement blog post says they plan to remove this limitation "early 2022", but it hadn't happened yet. I next looked at fly.io, which seem ok for the first two apps, assuming they use the same database. If I ever want more than two apps, it seems I will need to start hosting different apps together, which is the opposite of the headache-free experience I'm looking for. Porter runs on my own cloud account, so I can't trust it to not cost too much. Maybe I can get a Kubernetes cluster somewhere (DigitalOcean?) and deploy all my small apps to it, but it sounds like a headache. I'm staying with heroku.

forkfork 4y ago

I work for a non-Heroku tech vendor, and I have always spoken highly of Heroku to my customers from my past experience of going all-in on Heroku, and receiving a top quality of support from Heroku back in 2017-2019. I'm going to point folks to the recent Hacker News threads now. It is difficult for me to understand why Salesforce is not aware of the strength of the Heroku brand among experienced technology workers, and how much they have destroyed that brand in the last 2-3 years.

oxff 4y ago

> [..] No more Heroku signups, you'll need a Salesforce account to use it. No more free tier either. Guess I'm packing it up as I'm no longer seen as target audience (its my hobby project platform) > New features have been banned for years. Only "keep the lights on" projects are allowed. What???

chillfox 4y ago

Well, that’s sad. I guess it’s Fly or Digital Ocean for all future projects then.

your_username 4y ago
oxff 4y ago
There is some comparison of DO's App platform and Google's Cloud offerings here if you are interested (not my blog, just found it helpful: https://blog.verygoodsoftwarenotvirus.ru/posts/greener-cloud-pastures/ https://blog.verygoodsoftwarenotvirus.ru/posts/greener-cloud...)
gabereiser 4y ago
Don’t forget render.com

throwawaysfdc 4y ago

Periwinkle never materialized. Neither did Shinrai, or a number of other projects that people brought up in hn threads about this incident. It’s clear that Heroku has lost a ton of great talent and momentum due to questionable business decisions but some of the most controversial fail to ever make it past codename status.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hthrowaway3 4y ago
It's on ice. As you say it's also not the first time they've attempted something like this. Eventually they'll get there, but customers should know that's the direction. They'll be users of "Compute Cloud" writing APEX instead of Procfiles someday.
- Mandatum 4y ago
  Remember when Salesforce was moving off of Oracle within 2 years? A decade ago..
  - rhizome 4y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if Larry got them CIA/gov't contracts to avoid anything like that happening.

jrochkind1 4y ago

> New features have been banned for years. Only "keep the lights on" projects are allowed. That's what it's looked like from the outside -- that no features were for whatever reason(s) no longer going to happen. But still dismaying to hear it from the inside in those terms.

hthrowaway3 4y ago
You've gotta go way back on the Heroku Changelog to find anything that isn't a language version upgrade or feature removal: https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog I think the feature freeze happened in 2018
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  The interesting thing is that heroku still is so at the top of what it does, as far as developer UX and ease and reliability. It's hard to describe exactly what i mean, but I know plenty of other people agree. Other things do other things better -- but it's only in the past year or two that some things have started to come close or equal. I don't know what's going on exactly. Those who set up heroku for the first ~5 years somehow did such a good job that they could coast for another 5-10 and still stay on top of what they were on top of.