28 ms·

Why did Heroku fail?

215 points by rckrd 4y ago

bko 4y ago
I read the article but I'm still confused by the premise. What does it mean that Heroku failed? They're still around although owned by Salesforce. Are there are metrics that they're not making money or have no/negative growth? What am I missing?
- bogwog 4y ago
  The article also says that OpenShift failed, even though it is also still around and (presumably) making money.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    The all in one app platform model just doesn’t work for everything. What CIO/CTO is going to bet everything on some magic high level platform?
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  They have not pushed out any notable updates in a long time, bugs have remained unfixed for many years, customer support is unhelpful. All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left, the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce. It's a zombie of a company. The product and pricing are pretty good for small projects, but almost everyone outgrows Heroku well before they transition from "small" to "medium". The pricing model hasn't changed in many years. Dyno sizing hasn't changed or improved pretty much ever. Now that compelling alternatives to Heroku exist (Render, fly, even Netlify) there's no good reason to launch a new project on Heroku. Hell, even Elastic Beanstalk manages to give a decent experience for many folks compared to Heroku.
  - throwawaysfdc 4y ago
    > the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce This is definitely false. Though some internal apps are deployed on Heroku, it is not the primary deployment target for new projects. Heroku staff work on Heroku. Salesforce has a large internal infra program and team that has no overlap with Heroku. past codename projects have been proposed to change this, but none have ever come to be.
    - sergiomattei 4y ago
      Even if the parent comment is wrong, there must be a public relations problem if so many people believe the product to be abandoned.
    - throwaway427 4y ago
      Since you seem to have some insight into this, I interviewed a former Heroku eng a while back and he said that they deploy Heroku infra on Heroku, essentially dogfooding their own product. I also see a lot of claims that Heroku has essentially stagnated on features. I'm curious how do internal teams reconcile this (do they just work around the stagnation?) and is there a layer that is a choke point for product improvement that also affects to internal teams (if so that would seem demoralizing)?
      - xena 4y ago
        There are a bunch of internal only feature flags that Herokai use internally. Making internally visible feature flags is less of a political fight than making externally visible features.
      - hthrowaway5 4y ago
        Most of their attrition is due to the slow rate of product improvements. So yeah, it's demoralizing for sure. I've heard this as a reason for leaving for almost a decade though so it hasn't been a new problem but it seems to get worse every year.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - hthrowaway5 4y ago
      (Former Herokai) It is definitely not false but you misunderstood what they meant. You understood it as running sfdc code on Heroku which is not happening—but was proposed as part of Shinrai (a failed project). What has happened is many if not most Heroku employees have moved away from working on Heroku and are now working on Salesforce Functions aka Evergreen.
  - stevenharman 4y ago
    - sodality2 4y ago
      Is it a bad idea to post this under your full name? Edit: Above content was expletive-laden sentence against anyone who dares insult Heroku
      - stevenharman 4y ago
        As the author, I disagree. It was an expletive-laden sentence against anyone who dares insult the hard working, dedicated, caring, compassionate, and very talented folks who work tirelessly behind the scenes to make Heroku a reality.
        sodality2 4y ago
        I mean, fair enough, if that is true then respect to you. But I just figured it might come off as tasteless and maybe not a good idea to represent Heroku with.
      - burnished 4y ago
        >> All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left, >LOL… Fuck right the fuck off. The quote that is no longer visible if you haven't turned on 'see dead posts' or whatever the setting is. >Is it a bad idea to post this under your full name? From my perspective, no, it is not a bad idea. It is a pretty toothless sentence, it expresses displeasure but doesn't even go so far as to insult.. On the other hand, I'm a vulgar contrarian and would be unlikely to face any social censure for saying things like that, so of course it seems relatively reasonable to me. Are you in a social context such that if you felt insulted in public and answered similarly that you'd fear backlash?
  - craigkerstiens 4y ago
    This is a bad take without much internal context. Heroku is not thriving as it stands today. It takes a lot just to run Heroku and the engineers still around care deeply around it. I'm excited for a lot of the new offerings like Fly and Railway, but they aren't operating at the same scale as Heroku. It does feel like there continues to be a fading at a leadership level about developer experience and what it means. There may not be strategy for what makes Heroku the next Heroku whether engineering or product, but the team that is still there is a solid set of engineers, not 100% there for Salesforce internal stuff, and kudos to them for still keeping afloat what is one of the better ways to deploy an app.
    - dubswithus 4y ago
      For Fly.io I need to create a docker container? Why would I want to do that when I can just push to Heroku?
      - jolux 4y ago
        I can see this argument but at the same time Dockerfiles for my preferred framework (Phoenix) are more or less muscle memory for me at this point. The better question is: why don't frameworks come with a Dockerfile by default? The effort:reward ratio on containerization is huge, it gives you your app in a runnable, dependency-free format that you can build reliably and deploy on an extremely diverse set of platforms.
        jakear 4y ago
        Dependency free? Isn’t Docker a dependency itself? And it’s the most annoying one — no other dependency constantly keeps a core going at 15% on my machine, or considers not upgrading a premium feature, or incessantly interrupts my work with NPS pop ups even when I’m doing nothing related to Docker. If anyone at Docker is reading this, I mark “100% no” when you interrupt me with pop up asking if I’d recommend your product to a friend when I’m in the middle of working on something entirely unrelated to your product. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t.
  - listenallyall 4y ago
    > Render, fly, even Netlify Pretty sure none of these can run any JVM applications. Heroku can, very easily.
    - Scarbutt 4y ago
      They can, by using docker.
      - swat535 4y ago
        And yet, this is why Heroku is around. It is _still_ the easiest way to deploy your application to the cloud. Just do a git push and call it a day.. it has tons of integrations, can easily scale, has great backup and redundancy, integrated pipelines, review apps, great CLI.. People here underestimate the cost of wasting time setting up docker containers and fiddling with configuration files. Heroku is about delegating 90% of your Dev-Ops and actually focusing on your product and it pretty much works flawlessly with many stacks. I looked at all the alternatives that people mentioned here and none of them hold a candle to Heroku (yes, even in its current degrading state). Perhaps eventually they will, but so far, I am not impressed. Now if you excuse me, I have a product to build :)
      - listenallyall 4y ago
        Lol. So can my $2 VPS, then.
  - jbm 4y ago
    > All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left There are still plenty of talented engineers at Heroku. I used to do architecture work and support for enterprise customers and I knew the whole support team. Heroku support engineers are all devs or former devs; I am surprised at how passionate they can be about their work (ex: Jason, who STILL keeps the subreddit updated in his spare time). I do think there are situations where support can't help, but those are usually situations where Heroku is probably not the right place to host a service. They can't help you setup crypto miners on the platform, or to setup a redirect service. If you don't like how the platform works, they can drop in suggestions on what to change, but they aren't going to be able to implement them overnight. You might get ideas on restructuring your app to work better on Heroku, which I admit is quite frustrating for a customer; but limiting the problem domain is part of building a service like Heroku. Heroku's support structure didn't have a half dozen escalations, which was good IMO. If you run into an issue on the platform, there is usually the support engineer and then engineers who developed it. This might have changed around when I left (my team was mostly eliminated during the pandemic), so I'm not particularly up-to-date on recent changes. However, the system they had in place when I was there felt much better, as a developer who needs help, than the support I currently get from (large IAAS provider), despite myself doing work for a major customer of theirs.
    - hthrowaway5 4y ago
      You support folks were absolutely stellar. Great at working with customers but also adept at coding enough to resolve an incredible amount of customer problems. If anyone is ever in a position to hire support staff and you see "Heroku" on the resume, definitely consider that a strong positive signal.
    - bastawhiz 4y ago
      > I do think there are situations where support can't help, but those are usually situations where Heroku is probably not the right place to host a service. This hasn't been my experience at all. Mysterious performance issues are met with "We can't help, just install NewRelic" (the issues don't exist when running the same code on other services). Billing questions have yielded delayed and cryptic responses. Table stakes customer support simply isn't being addressed. And I don't blame the support agents, I just don't think they have the tools or resources to help. By comparison, AWS has managed to answer almost all of my questions within one or two messages. Hell, even Amazon has admitted when there's a bug on their end. That simply doesn't happen at heroku anymore.
- gkoberger 4y ago
  I wouldn't say it failed yet, but the writing is on the wall. GitHub Sync has been down for over a month and they think all API keys leaked and... it seems nobody cares. Communication is at a minimum, the UI is broken, we have no clue if our API keys were leaked, etc. It's clear nobody at Heroku cares anymore. (For the record, I loved Heroku and still do. This makes me so sad. I'd love to see Salesforce spin it off somehow, rather than slowly letting it suffocate.)
fdr 4y ago
Depends what is meant by "failed." I worked there for a long time, in the earlier days. I also used it quite a bit after I left. From my point of view, as a mere customer of their mass-market product (a.k.a. cedar) with some insight into operation history, I think expensive or at least detailed investment in refurbishing or adjusting the mass-market product became, for whatever reason, difficult to (internally) justify expense for. For example: the mechanisms that make "heroku run" work could have really used a new version that could let me change my window size gracefully, and maybe streamlining some authentication, by using SSH. As far as I know, it's closely related to the first version of that feature ever written, which somewhat naively ties the client machine's tty to a remote tty via TLS connection. This is fine for getting cedar off the ground in the first release, but at some later year (decade?), it seems like it should have gotten re-do so, finally, I could change my terminal emulator window size. Ditto the holding of extremely powerful API credentials in the plaintext file `~/.netrc`, further exacerbated by a fairly weak authorization system for Cedar. There's still a place for .netrc (e.g. so curl can pick up the credentials automatically), but at some point, use of the keyrings on various operating systems (at least) and U2F hardware attestation should have shown up. Passing along cost reductions in inputs (e.g. AWS servers) is another long-standing example. Somewhat related to that, IPv6 is a lot more common than it used to be. So are VPCs or similar products on other platforms. Putting all that behind a "let's have a call" process -- and cost structure -- for "Private Spaces" is not in step with the times in 2022. And probably not 2018, neither. As a counter-example, it does seem the web/dashboard login not only grew U2F, but Macintosh TouchID support. Whoever got this in: well done. But it's a noteworthy exception. And I kind of wonder if it has anything to do with the web authentication system being more trouble than it's worth to segment between Cedar and the Private Spaces product. There's always a temptation to put new features into an upmarket product to increase the gap in segmentation, but realizing that at least some features are closer to adaptations to raising or at least changing standards of adequacy in industry does not come naturally. I don't think this is the only problem, but it seems like a problem to me. As it comes to projects that turn on minute details, such as improving "heroku run" in the presence of terminal emulator resizing, it probably says something about the bureaucracy's inability to grapple with details of that kind. That was already present when I left.
- bgentry 4y ago
aquaticsunset 4y ago
The implication here is that Heroku is a standalone company with its full efforts being put toward the product. The article should, in my opinion, focus on why Salesforce allowed Heroku to stagnate and grow uncompetitive. [Disclaimer: Salesforce employee, thoughts and opinions are my own]
- filmgirlcw 4y ago
  Exactly this.
- njudah 4y ago
  - Heroku generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. There are plenty of interesting things to debate about its past and future, but it was not a failure by any reasonable definition. - Salesforce did ~27b in revenue in 2022; its very hard for a comparatively small business to get resources / mindshare in that environment, especially when you focus on a market / audience that is different than the rest of the business. From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products - its interested in selling them largely as is to existing customers. Fundamentally its a financial engineering and sales exercise, not a product innovation one. (Not to say I support or think thats the best way of driving growth, but offering my POV on the structural dynamics.)
  - tschellenbach 4y ago
    I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition
    - pan69 4y ago
      Isn't the elephant in the room then; why did Salesforce buy Heroku? I mean: > From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products > I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?
tpmx 4y ago
Salesforce also owns Slack... Is this a preview of what will happen to it?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- stormbrew 4y ago
  It’s a preview of all big fish:small fish acquisitions really. There are some notable exceptions, but for the most part you should assume that an acquisition of a product you use will eventually mean you’ll need to go elsewhere imo.
  - rhizome 4y ago
    Acquisitions always ruin the thing being acquired.
    - beachy 4y ago
      Like Youtube, that struggling video streaming platform?
      - closedloop129 4y ago
        Like twitter, being dominant is no measurement of success for an established network. Is there any innovation apart from the increase in advertising? Tiktok offers a new suggestion algorithm. Why has something like that not been invented at Youtube? Why does Youtube try to copy Tiktok a bit but does not generalize and does not offer more ways to access videos? At their position, they could turn Youtube into a platform and let others do the innovation. Instead, they lock it down and double down on their limited user experience. In 30 years, when something else has been established, Youtube can ask itself why it was not them. But it will take time for a competitor to establish itself and overcome the network effect.
    - xeromal 4y ago
      I would say Google Maps and Android were excellent acquisition stories.
jmull 4y ago
Heroku failed?
nberkman 4y ago
> If Heroku and Engine Yard were too early, we would have seen more widespread adoption of next-generation PaaS (e.g., fly.io, Render). Seems premature to assess adoption of fly.io when it's barely gotten off the ground.
monus21 4y ago
A compelling successor to both Heroku and App Engine is Google Cloud Run. Dead simple to setup, no frills and cheap to run.
simplehuman 4y ago
It didn't?
craigkerstiens 4y ago
As someone that put a good portion of their working career into helping create Heroku alongside many others, several who contributed way more and had a larger impact, the notion that it failed is probably the first thing that should be up for debate. But because we seem to want to debate this on a weekly basis... Heroku made reproducible builds and deployments a thing at a time people were used to ssh'ing in and scp'ing files around for deployment. While 12factor later become canonized it was built into Heroku since day 1. Heroku was created because you could spend a month building a MVP app in Rails, but then it'd take as long to deploy it as to build it. Deploying software was too hard. And today we're still trying to get back to that, sometimes very unsuccessfully by adding abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer. Did Heroku fail? We're still talking about it over 10 years since being acquired as a gold standard for developer experience. Okay, fine, but it wasn't acquired for something like GitHub... While two very different companies Heroku was acquired nearly 10 years earlier. It was the first large scale acquisition out of YC. I do not know the internals of YC, but it's been commented by others that know it better the exit of Heroku helped greatly YC for the time and place it was. It was a different time. Heroku to this day generates revenue and likely it's different from what people expect. Yeah this one is selfish, but you can largely thank Heroku for Amazon RDS. Way back in the day we had Rails devs asking for a database. We thought how hard could this be, it turns out it was much more work than we expected. We bet on Postgres because one of our engineers said it had a great track record of security and reliability (not playing fast and loose with data semantics)–it was the right choice. Years later when Amazon adding support for Postgres on RDS the team sent some personal notes that essentially said, this is because you made it so in demand. Now... what went wrong. Yes, several people left after the acquisition, some at 2-3 years, some at 4-5 years, some are still there and have been before the acquisition. Acquisition or not when some of the technical and product visionaries leave it's hard to replace that. Adam gave his absolute all, he was spent after. 12factor felt like his going away letter. But that void was never fully filled, some of us may have had a shot of it, but after long runs were also tired. Was Heroku cocky at times toward Salesforce integration, at times yes. At times I don't think was always the case. Did we want to run 20GB J2EE apps when Rails/Django/Node were lighter-weight, of course not. Did we want to login to gus to open a support ticket on a VPN? No. Did we want to move into the SDFC offices that were cube farms vs. large ceilings with a lot of natural lighting?No. But could Salesforce help us make Heroku more available to customers and accelerate adoption? Sure. Could we have focused more on enterprise requirements around security and compliance to reach the enterprise audience? Yep. In retrospect maybe we should have proactively integrated a bit more, I know many of us there at that time feel that way, but there were pockets of integration. I recall hosting the Sayonara team at the Heroku office for a Friday happy hour. We made sure to have it well catered and make them feel as welcome as possible. There was good and bad in the integration, but a common metric of acquisition metrics is how many that are employed at time of acquisition are employed x years later. Heroku had a lot of us still there, 2, 3, 4, 5 and even beyond. Was pricing and business model a factor? Maybe. But I'm not sure you can get what Heroku gives you out of a single employee. I'm excited for what others are building in this space now, but it's not about being a "cheaper" Heroku it's about creating some advancements about easier networking, packaging what defines as an app as multiple services, signed/secure builds.
2c2c2c 4y ago
i started at a company as engineer #1 and my first task was to take an outsourced MVP built on heroku, port it from ruby to python, and make it work on aws. there was seemingly no logical reason to do any of this-- the product was at an early stage with nearly no traffic. even if the product were to become immensely successful, the traffic would probably never require more than a single box. but none of this seemed to matter. nor did the considerable amount of time making things just work. the ceo, who was at one point a technical engineer mind you, just wanted to be able to say his stuff ran on aws situations like this are probably more common than you would think. it's purely a brand recognition thing for them
- barbecue_sauce 4y ago
  You can't run Ruby on AWS?
  - 2c2c2c 4y ago
    ceo did not like ruby. neither did I! I only ever worked with it for the port.
    - barbecue_sauce 4y ago
      I, too, do not like Ruby.
- avodonosov 4y ago
  As the engineer #1 did you have any equity? If yes, was it OK for you to work on an unreasonable task? Was the company successful after all?
  - 2c2c2c 4y ago
    Yes I had equity. I'm fine working on unreasonable things to an extent. On the one hand in an early startup you have a lot of input on how things should work. On the other it can be hard to push hard against an owner's idea when you're in no position of power The company was acquired at an early stage by another private company.
mfer 4y ago
Did Heroku fail? Heroku was the biggest in a long line of developer tools. The PaaS and now FaaS models are still alive and well. A lot of developers want them. I know people are hot on containers and k8s but devs, who need to focus on code and business logic, have poorer productivity when they have to shift into thinking about ops. Heroku inspired a lot including direct competitors (like Cloud Foundry). A lot of money has been made and people jobs make easier. On the flip side, I keep seeing businesses not wanting to invest in developer tools that make their lives easier. PaaS is one of them. Did Salesforce fail to invest in Heroku so it stagnated? How many other places is this happening? Did Heroku make enough money and that was it? There are a lot of unknowns. I think we need more PaaS and FaaS. Make the jobs of developers simpler (hiding the ops complexity).
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  > Heroku inspired a lot including direct competitors (like Cloud Foundry). A lot of money has been made and people jobs make easier. Ah Cloud Foundry. Something I drink to forget. CF was the tool Salesforce should've bought or written. Heroku not so much.
  - jrudolph 4y ago
    Was it so bad? My experience with it was resoundingly positive, and saw lots of productivity gains with a great developer experience for teams that could build apps with strong guard rails in place. Now everyone and the kitchen sink „needs“ their own kubernetes cluster and operations teams struggle to build complex landing zones for the underlying cloud infrastructure so teams don’t shoot their own foot off all too easily…
    - inferiorhuman 4y ago
      For context: I was at a company that was trying to roll out OpenStack internally (don't do this). Lots of stuff got thrown at the wall in an attempt to find a unified provisioner, nearly all of it terrible. Thankfully my role was that of a consumer. My recollections were that BOSH and CF exposed a ton more complexity than I wanted, and I don't remember there being a great story for deploying Rails apps. But all of these abstraction layers are just like cross-platform GUI toolkits – you're never going to approach the native look and feel or integration. And I don't like the terminology(!) it's all relatively unintuitive to me (e.g. stem cells, deployments, releases). For contrast the Hashicorp stack for our AWS environments (tf+packer+vault) generally felt much more pleasant to deal with, and that's where the comparison to GUI toolkits falls apart I suppose. But… look at all the integrations and enterprisey features that CF+BOSH offer. That's way more of the sort of thing that I'd expect to fit in at Salesforce.
subpixel 4y ago
The author hints more than once at unfulfilled OpenShift potential. I’m not familiar with anything that OpenShift set out to do but failed to realize. Genuinely curious.
anurag 4y ago
> If Heroku and Engine Yard were too early, we would have seen more widespread adoption of next-generation PaaS (e.g., fly.io, Render). Biased take from the founder of one of the next-generation companies mentioned: given how new Render and Fly are as companies and products, it's much more important to look at the growth in their adoption. Render's signups were already growing at a rapid pace, but more than doubled overnight after the Heroku incident; give us a couple more years before judging adoption!
- jonfleck 4y ago
  Those who aren't adopting are missing out! I've been using Render for a few months now on a postgresql/next.js app and it's really good! Hopefully the new signups continue to accelerate
nickstinemates 4y ago
Heroku changed the world, there's no metric I can fathom that you can point to and say - yep, failure. A great deal of the movement to containers lies on the shoulders of the DevEx that Heroku pioneered. There's a lot of new investment in a lot of new projects; it's cool to see. I hope they carry the torch forward and are successful in their own right. I am looking forward to deploying code on all of them.
bpeebles 4y ago
It hasn't failed. I'm not sure the final outcome of the current debacle but there's still nothing that matches Heroku. I've been using it professionally for 6+ years now and it just works more than most other things I've used. It has its weird limitations but it's... Good. (And I've gone pretty deep into aspects of the buildpacks, how it stores its git repos on S3, and more.)
- dubswithus 4y ago
  Elastic Beanstalk is a shitshow compared to Heroku. Takes so much time to get an app to work.
the__alchemist 4y ago
Am I missing something? Should I be moving my websites off Heroku?
glenngillen 4y ago
I was a relatively early Heroku employee, though still technically started _after_ the acquisition. I've spent the much of the last 10 years hoping that I once again get to be part of such a failure. It's such a rare opportunity to work with an amazing team of talented people who set a new standard for what a great developer experience is, how simple it should be to run containerized workloads, that a robust build pipeline can actually be easy to use, setting the precedent for what a tightly integrated SaaS ecosystem/marketplace looks like, review apps, buildpacks... things that improved the lives for literally millions of developers. And even a decade later continue to set the bar for what many aspire to. An amazing legacy to have a product that has been so relevant for so long in what is such a fast moving industry. I wish everyone got to be part of such a failure at least once in their careers. It's something I'll cherish for the rest of my days.
- tootie 4y ago
  People still use it as a benchmark. I see products marketed like "Heroku for mobile apps" and the like. It's the gold standard for PaaS even when it doesn't work.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - hackernewds 4y ago
    Why?
- bjeanes 4y ago
  Agree 100%. Also, thanks for hiring me into Heroku at the time, even if it's behind both of us now <3
throw_m239339 4y ago
Heroku didn't fail in the sense that it put emphasis on developer experience when it comes to SAAS + the market place model for services. So it didn't fail, it was just successfully copied by the competition, like Azure or Google Cloud.
zoomzoom 4y ago
First - as others have done, I think we have to challenge the premise that Heroku failed. It's still the gold standard 15 years later and the default for many knowledgable folks. Obviously given the hype around k8s and the order of magnitude difference between the success of the hyperscalers and the scale of Heroku, there's some mismatch btetween what they did and the potential they had. I would say the same about App Engine and AWS's various iterations starting with Elastic Beanstalk. Overall if we had to bucket the opportunity that still exists to do better in the space, I think it aligned with wrong product and something better than "git push heroku" better than with business model, whole product, or timing (which clearly had a role). Business model is an issue but not against stuff like render, the success of which also pushes against whole product (people are still adopting something very similar). Agree with craigkerstiens that the next iteration is about apps vs. services, extensibility, and blending different service types (frontend/container/serverless/data) more fully than Heroku (which really only has one type of app) was able to. And is also about lifecycle and SDLC completeness (which helps a lot with security and compliance, too). As I mention on all these Heroku threads lately, I'm the cofounder of Coherence (www.withcoherence.com) where I think we're taking an interesting stab at what the future looks like here, using first principles to go deeper than other PaaS and integrate dev more deeply, along with more support for extensibility.
deleted 4y ago
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obiefernandez 4y ago
What the actual fuck? Other than the recent Github debacle, Heroku has been one of my favorite and most consistently used services for over a decade. The notion that it failed is ridiculous.
ilaksh 4y ago
WTF is he talking about? They were acquired for $212 million. One of the most popular services like it ever. I am going to flag this post.
- hthrowaway5 4y ago
  12 years ago! Heroku of 2010 was a success. Heroku of 2015 was a success. Heroku of 2022 is a zombie of its former self headed straight towards implosion.
xcskier56 4y ago
It didn’t fail for me. If hosting my first app/mvp hadn’t been so simple, I’m not sure I would have kept going down the software development path; and for that, I’m incredibly grateful.
gtirloni 4y ago
Since when Heroku failed? It's one of those articles that maybe went too extreme with clickbait title that's so off-putting that I don't even bother to open.
lewisjoe 4y ago
Early user here. One of the very first apps I ever built ran on heroku. Thanks for that experience. Heroku taught me deployments can be a single day effort during a time when I didn't even know deployments usually are more difficult than that. I'm just grateful Heroku existed at that point of my life :)
nomilk 4y ago
> why haven't they figured out how to make it viable Any data to support this? I suspect Heroku is immensely profitable on account of its huge user base (4th largest cloud provider after AWS, Azure, and GCP), and very healthy profit margins.
deleted 4y ago
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nomilk 4y ago
Reminds me of a Sam Altman quote about Airbnb: > for all that people worry and for all that the press loves to say, 'Ah, this happened; this thing is over,' and whip themselves up in this frenzy, it never actually kills the startup. It's a problem; people love to talk about it. And there's this schadenfreude of loving to hate on someone's perceived missteps or someone's problem. So people love to talk about it. But then they go back and they book AirBnB for their next vacation. Econtalk Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAYXUgNHHc4&t=16m25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAYXUgNHHc4&t=16m25s
nso95 4y ago
Looks like it's still up and running, not sure that qualifies as a failure
- number6 4y ago
  I remember when you just git pushed to heroku and your stuff magically was a working deploy. Later there was docker and after setting up your CI/CD you had almost the same heroku experience with half of the costs. As deployment became easier there was no need for heroku. Is was killed by Docker. Yeah you still can use it. But sure it's pricey...
lifeplusplus 4y ago
Only thing heroku fail at was not becoming more cheap but other than it's good as it gets
pc2g4d 4y ago
Current paying Heroku customer, so... feels successful enough to me!
- jspash 4y ago
  Same here, however... What I love about HN is the exposure to new ideas and suggestions. I've seen suggested here that fly.io is a cheaper alternative that people rave about. I had a quick look at their site and so far I like what I see. So come Monday morning I'm going to add a ticket to the dev queue: Investigate moving from Heroku -> Fly.io We'll look at the pros and cons. Pricing. Ease of use. etc. The usual. And my gut tells me that heroku might be losing yet one more customer and the tens of thousands per year that my company is currently spending with them. We're a small team, so it was decided to spend the money on a PaaS instead of a large ops team. It's worked well enough for the past 15 years. So maybe time to move?
sq1020 4y ago
Does Matz still work at Heroku?
nunez 4y ago
> Containers (introduced in 2013) also changed DevOps and software deployment landscape. Yet, container-native PaaS (e.g., OpenShift) also failed. If being in every Fortune 100 company running some of the world's largest containerized platforms in production is failure, I want to fail like that
evoxmusic 4y ago
Heroku didn't failed, they have been a huge innovative solution for a world generation in of developers. As a CEO and developer myself, I do believe that the next gen platform would be based on a similar experience as Heroku, but on top of the best cloud service providers. E.g: Qovery.com is the Heroku-like experience on top of AWS (I am co-founder of Qovery)
unixhero 4y ago
Has Heroku failed? I. checked its website and they seem to be operating nominally.
M0r13n 4y ago
Are there any real alternatives to Heroku for small to medium sized projects? I am talking about projects with only one or two engineers. Those engineers likely focus on providing value for the customer by improving the actual product itself. Instead of taking care of deploying their project on AWS, which is quite complex, if you do not use it regularly. I am myself maintaining a custom built webshop/ERP system for a local company that repairs smartphones. I barely find enough time to maintain the actual code. If I would have to dig through the weeds on AWS the project would definitely be dead right now. Instead I just "git push heroku main" and I am done. I can also provision a database or Redis through the UI, without having to worry that I made a mistake that could cost me thousands of Dollars.
- emerongi 4y ago
  - render.com - fly.dev I'm sure there's others, these are just the ones I happen to remember at the moment.
- krajzeg 4y ago
  Migrated a small production Node app from Heroku to Render recently due to costs and that security debacle. Render is pretty much on the same level when it comes to convenience (push-to-deploy, etc.), but they're a bit more limited in what they support. They do have some features that Heroku doesn't have. The migration took me ~1 hour altogether. - For languages, they support less stuff than Heroku (unless you're willing to do Docker yourself). - For DBs, they can do Postgres or Redis on their end, other stuff is on you if you need it. - Out-of-the-box metrics don't include basic stuff such as requests-per-sec or http status codes, so you do have to plug something external in for that. + HTTPS on custom domain using LetsEncrypt was a breeze and free. + They have "disks", which is a persistent filesystem for your app. Very useful if a normal FS is better than a DB for any of your things (image processing in my case).
- belfalas 4y ago
  App Platform from Digital Ocean is not as full-featured as Heroku but you can tell they are building towards parity. Good pricing and thus far no real hiccups for us in 1 year of usage.
rsecora 4y ago
Being there, price move me out. The selling point was easy and reproducible deployment. But there are must cheaper alternatives, and dynos productivity didn't have enough benefits for the cost.
krajzeg 4y ago
This title seems very premature, and the article itself doesn't justify it well. While there are reasons to not use Heroku (pricing, the security debacle) and be annoyed with them, I don't see any signs of them losing their position in their sector of the market yet. They are still the go-to if you're in the "small-size project, don't want hassle, set up everything for me please" space. They might lose that position in the future due to many missteps, but at this point it's like asking "why did Microsoft fail?". It didn't. It might not be what it was, but it's still a pretty successful concern, and same goes for Heroku. Having alternatives is very cool. I did migrate an app to Render, motivated by Heroku's recent security woes. But in the process of doing so, I realized that Heroku has accumulated a lot of plugins, conveniences etc. over the years. If Heroku dropped their prices to be a bit less egregious, I probably wouldn't bother moving. It will take quite a while before anybody can match them on convenience, and eg. Render is definitely not there yet - it has the basics down and done right, and if the basics are enough for you, it'll work. But a lot of things you get out of the box one-click support for in Heroku will be a manual setup on the alternative PaaSes, with a community wiki article to guide you at best.
- hthrowaway5 4y ago
  The only way they're going to succeed is if sfdc quadruples (or more) their headcount. We were struggling with product development and maintenance with the skeleton crew we had back in 2015 and probably had 3x as many people then.
abalone 4y ago
Two reasons: * expensive to scale * developer limitations This limited it to smaller scale projects, MVPs, proof of concepts where paying a little more for a certain range of developer productivity makes sense. Such is the case with rapid development platforms in general. When you grow you shift to wholesale-priced primitives that give you more control.
WhyNotHugo 4y ago
I worked at a few small shops that initially used Heroku. The story in all of them was the same: Heroku is nice and simple to start with the free/lower plans, but gets too expensive as you grow a bit more. Once we'd grown past the free/lower plans, we'd move on to somewhere else, that required a bit more work, but was substantially cheaper and way more flexible. Also an issue was a reproducible environment for several devs. Using docker became super easy, but this didn't translate well into Heroku. We either needed to maintain buildpacks and dockerfiles in sync, or move to a platform where we ran docker. Not sure if this has changed since, but this was also a big reason to move elsewhere.
kamrani 4y ago
Cloud has almost completely replaced the old datacenters however still the teams are spending a lot of time and money on managing it. Heroku solved the problem very well for years but it's very costly and limiting at the same time. Now it's time to replace Heroku with services that help you use the cloud providers which leads to substantial cost savings. We're very soon launching https://www.utopiops.com https://www.utopiops.com which is an alternative for Heroku on AWS to address this particular issue.
sfc32 4y ago
Who said it failed? Heroku might be a bit long in the tooth, but has a solid company behind it and it a lot easier than fooling around with Capistrano, Ansible or heaven-help-us Kubernetes. Trust me, I've tried them all, and for a fairly standard Rails app Heroku just works. The lack of HTTP2 is a bit embarrassing though.
Komodai 4y ago
Terrible take, Heroku didn't fail.

215 points by rckrd 4y ago

bko 4y ago

I read the article but I'm still confused by the premise. What does it mean that Heroku failed? They're still around although owned by Salesforce. Are there are metrics that they're not making money or have no/negative growth? What am I missing?

bogwog 4y ago
The article also says that OpenShift failed, even though it is also still around and (presumably) making money.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  The all in one app platform model just doesn’t work for everything. What CIO/CTO is going to bet everything on some magic high level platform?
bastawhiz 4y ago
They have not pushed out any notable updates in a long time, bugs have remained unfixed for many years, customer support is unhelpful. All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left, the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce. It's a zombie of a company. The product and pricing are pretty good for small projects, but almost everyone outgrows Heroku well before they transition from "small" to "medium". The pricing model hasn't changed in many years. Dyno sizing hasn't changed or improved pretty much ever. Now that compelling alternatives to Heroku exist (Render, fly, even Netlify) there's no good reason to launch a new project on Heroku. Hell, even Elastic Beanstalk manages to give a decent experience for many folks compared to Heroku.
- throwawaysfdc 4y ago
  > the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce This is definitely false. Though some internal apps are deployed on Heroku, it is not the primary deployment target for new projects. Heroku staff work on Heroku. Salesforce has a large internal infra program and team that has no overlap with Heroku. past codename projects have been proposed to change this, but none have ever come to be.
  - sergiomattei 4y ago
    Even if the parent comment is wrong, there must be a public relations problem if so many people believe the product to be abandoned.
  - throwaway427 4y ago
    Since you seem to have some insight into this, I interviewed a former Heroku eng a while back and he said that they deploy Heroku infra on Heroku, essentially dogfooding their own product. I also see a lot of claims that Heroku has essentially stagnated on features. I'm curious how do internal teams reconcile this (do they just work around the stagnation?) and is there a layer that is a choke point for product improvement that also affects to internal teams (if so that would seem demoralizing)?
    - xena 4y ago
      There are a bunch of internal only feature flags that Herokai use internally. Making internally visible feature flags is less of a political fight than making externally visible features.
    - hthrowaway5 4y ago
      Most of their attrition is due to the slow rate of product improvements. So yeah, it's demoralizing for sure. I've heard this as a reason for leaving for almost a decade though so it hasn't been a new problem but it seems to get worse every year.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hthrowaway5 4y ago
    (Former Herokai) It is definitely not false but you misunderstood what they meant. You understood it as running sfdc code on Heroku which is not happening—but was proposed as part of Shinrai (a failed project). What has happened is many if not most Heroku employees have moved away from working on Heroku and are now working on Salesforce Functions aka Evergreen.
- stevenharman 4y ago
  - sodality2 4y ago
    Is it a bad idea to post this under your full name? Edit: Above content was expletive-laden sentence against anyone who dares insult Heroku
    - stevenharman 4y ago
      As the author, I disagree. It was an expletive-laden sentence against anyone who dares insult the hard working, dedicated, caring, compassionate, and very talented folks who work tirelessly behind the scenes to make Heroku a reality.
      - sodality2 4y ago
        I mean, fair enough, if that is true then respect to you. But I just figured it might come off as tasteless and maybe not a good idea to represent Heroku with.
    - burnished 4y ago
      >> All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left, >LOL… Fuck right the fuck off. The quote that is no longer visible if you haven't turned on 'see dead posts' or whatever the setting is. >Is it a bad idea to post this under your full name? From my perspective, no, it is not a bad idea. It is a pretty toothless sentence, it expresses displeasure but doesn't even go so far as to insult.. On the other hand, I'm a vulgar contrarian and would be unlikely to face any social censure for saying things like that, so of course it seems relatively reasonable to me. Are you in a social context such that if you felt insulted in public and answered similarly that you'd fear backlash?
- craigkerstiens 4y ago
  This is a bad take without much internal context. Heroku is not thriving as it stands today. It takes a lot just to run Heroku and the engineers still around care deeply around it. I'm excited for a lot of the new offerings like Fly and Railway, but they aren't operating at the same scale as Heroku. It does feel like there continues to be a fading at a leadership level about developer experience and what it means. There may not be strategy for what makes Heroku the next Heroku whether engineering or product, but the team that is still there is a solid set of engineers, not 100% there for Salesforce internal stuff, and kudos to them for still keeping afloat what is one of the better ways to deploy an app.
  - dubswithus 4y ago
    For Fly.io I need to create a docker container? Why would I want to do that when I can just push to Heroku?
    - jolux 4y ago
      I can see this argument but at the same time Dockerfiles for my preferred framework (Phoenix) are more or less muscle memory for me at this point. The better question is: why don't frameworks come with a Dockerfile by default? The effort:reward ratio on containerization is huge, it gives you your app in a runnable, dependency-free format that you can build reliably and deploy on an extremely diverse set of platforms.
      - jakear 4y ago
        Dependency free? Isn’t Docker a dependency itself? And it’s the most annoying one — no other dependency constantly keeps a core going at 15% on my machine, or considers not upgrading a premium feature, or incessantly interrupts my work with NPS pop ups even when I’m doing nothing related to Docker. If anyone at Docker is reading this, I mark “100% no” when you interrupt me with pop up asking if I’d recommend your product to a friend when I’m in the middle of working on something entirely unrelated to your product. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t.
- listenallyall 4y ago
  > Render, fly, even Netlify Pretty sure none of these can run any JVM applications. Heroku can, very easily.
  - Scarbutt 4y ago
    They can, by using docker.
    - swat535 4y ago
      And yet, this is why Heroku is around. It is _still_ the easiest way to deploy your application to the cloud. Just do a git push and call it a day.. it has tons of integrations, can easily scale, has great backup and redundancy, integrated pipelines, review apps, great CLI.. People here underestimate the cost of wasting time setting up docker containers and fiddling with configuration files. Heroku is about delegating 90% of your Dev-Ops and actually focusing on your product and it pretty much works flawlessly with many stacks. I looked at all the alternatives that people mentioned here and none of them hold a candle to Heroku (yes, even in its current degrading state). Perhaps eventually they will, but so far, I am not impressed. Now if you excuse me, I have a product to build :)
    - listenallyall 4y ago
      Lol. So can my $2 VPS, then.
- jbm 4y ago
  > All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left There are still plenty of talented engineers at Heroku. I used to do architecture work and support for enterprise customers and I knew the whole support team. Heroku support engineers are all devs or former devs; I am surprised at how passionate they can be about their work (ex: Jason, who STILL keeps the subreddit updated in his spare time). I do think there are situations where support can't help, but those are usually situations where Heroku is probably not the right place to host a service. They can't help you setup crypto miners on the platform, or to setup a redirect service. If you don't like how the platform works, they can drop in suggestions on what to change, but they aren't going to be able to implement them overnight. You might get ideas on restructuring your app to work better on Heroku, which I admit is quite frustrating for a customer; but limiting the problem domain is part of building a service like Heroku. Heroku's support structure didn't have a half dozen escalations, which was good IMO. If you run into an issue on the platform, there is usually the support engineer and then engineers who developed it. This might have changed around when I left (my team was mostly eliminated during the pandemic), so I'm not particularly up-to-date on recent changes. However, the system they had in place when I was there felt much better, as a developer who needs help, than the support I currently get from (large IAAS provider), despite myself doing work for a major customer of theirs.
  - hthrowaway5 4y ago
    You support folks were absolutely stellar. Great at working with customers but also adept at coding enough to resolve an incredible amount of customer problems. If anyone is ever in a position to hire support staff and you see "Heroku" on the resume, definitely consider that a strong positive signal.
  - bastawhiz 4y ago
    > I do think there are situations where support can't help, but those are usually situations where Heroku is probably not the right place to host a service. This hasn't been my experience at all. Mysterious performance issues are met with "We can't help, just install NewRelic" (the issues don't exist when running the same code on other services). Billing questions have yielded delayed and cryptic responses. Table stakes customer support simply isn't being addressed. And I don't blame the support agents, I just don't think they have the tools or resources to help. By comparison, AWS has managed to answer almost all of my questions within one or two messages. Hell, even Amazon has admitted when there's a bug on their end. That simply doesn't happen at heroku anymore.
gkoberger 4y ago
I wouldn't say it failed yet, but the writing is on the wall. GitHub Sync has been down for over a month and they think all API keys leaked and... it seems nobody cares. Communication is at a minimum, the UI is broken, we have no clue if our API keys were leaked, etc. It's clear nobody at Heroku cares anymore. (For the record, I loved Heroku and still do. This makes me so sad. I'd love to see Salesforce spin it off somehow, rather than slowly letting it suffocate.)

fdr 4y ago

Depends what is meant by "failed." I worked there for a long time, in the earlier days. I also used it quite a bit after I left. From my point of view, as a mere customer of their mass-market product (a.k.a. cedar) with some insight into operation history, I think expensive or at least detailed investment in refurbishing or adjusting the mass-market product became, for whatever reason, difficult to (internally) justify expense for. For example: the mechanisms that make "heroku run" work could have really used a new version that could let me change my window size gracefully, and maybe streamlining some authentication, by using SSH. As far as I know, it's closely related to the first version of that feature ever written, which somewhat naively ties the client machine's tty to a remote tty via TLS connection. This is fine for getting cedar off the ground in the first release, but at some later year (decade?), it seems like it should have gotten re-do so, finally, I could change my terminal emulator window size. Ditto the holding of extremely powerful API credentials in the plaintext file `~/.netrc`, further exacerbated by a fairly weak authorization system for Cedar. There's still a place for .netrc (e.g. so curl can pick up the credentials automatically), but at some point, use of the keyrings on various operating systems (at least) and U2F hardware attestation should have shown up. Passing along cost reductions in inputs (e.g. AWS servers) is another long-standing example. Somewhat related to that, IPv6 is a lot more common than it used to be. So are VPCs or similar products on other platforms. Putting all that behind a "let's have a call" process -- and cost structure -- for "Private Spaces" is not in step with the times in 2022. And probably not 2018, neither. As a counter-example, it does seem the web/dashboard login not only grew U2F, but Macintosh TouchID support. Whoever got this in: well done. But it's a noteworthy exception. And I kind of wonder if it has anything to do with the web authentication system being more trouble than it's worth to segment between Cedar and the Private Spaces product. There's always a temptation to put new features into an upmarket product to increase the gap in segmentation, but realizing that at least some features are closer to adaptations to raising or at least changing standards of adequacy in industry does not come naturally. I don't think this is the only problem, but it seems like a problem to me. As it comes to projects that turn on minute details, such as improving "heroku run" in the presence of terminal emulator resizing, it probably says something about the bureaucracy's inability to grapple with details of that kind. That was already present when I left.

bgentry 4y ago

aquaticsunset 4y ago

The implication here is that Heroku is a standalone company with its full efforts being put toward the product. The article should, in my opinion, focus on why Salesforce allowed Heroku to stagnate and grow uncompetitive. [Disclaimer: Salesforce employee, thoughts and opinions are my own]

filmgirlcw 4y ago
Exactly this.
njudah 4y ago
- Heroku generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. There are plenty of interesting things to debate about its past and future, but it was not a failure by any reasonable definition. - Salesforce did ~27b in revenue in 2022; its very hard for a comparatively small business to get resources / mindshare in that environment, especially when you focus on a market / audience that is different than the rest of the business. From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products - its interested in selling them largely as is to existing customers. Fundamentally its a financial engineering and sales exercise, not a product innovation one. (Not to say I support or think thats the best way of driving growth, but offering my POV on the structural dynamics.)
- tschellenbach 4y ago
  I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition
  - pan69 4y ago
    Isn't the elephant in the room then; why did Salesforce buy Heroku? I mean: > From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products > I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?

tpmx 4y ago

Salesforce also owns Slack... Is this a preview of what will happen to it?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stormbrew 4y ago
It’s a preview of all big fish:small fish acquisitions really. There are some notable exceptions, but for the most part you should assume that an acquisition of a product you use will eventually mean you’ll need to go elsewhere imo.
- rhizome 4y ago
  Acquisitions always ruin the thing being acquired.
  - beachy 4y ago
    Like Youtube, that struggling video streaming platform?
    - closedloop129 4y ago
      Like twitter, being dominant is no measurement of success for an established network. Is there any innovation apart from the increase in advertising? Tiktok offers a new suggestion algorithm. Why has something like that not been invented at Youtube? Why does Youtube try to copy Tiktok a bit but does not generalize and does not offer more ways to access videos? At their position, they could turn Youtube into a platform and let others do the innovation. Instead, they lock it down and double down on their limited user experience. In 30 years, when something else has been established, Youtube can ask itself why it was not them. But it will take time for a competitor to establish itself and overcome the network effect.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    I would say Google Maps and Android were excellent acquisition stories.

jmull 4y ago

Heroku failed?

nberkman 4y ago

> If Heroku and Engine Yard were too early, we would have seen more widespread adoption of next-generation PaaS (e.g., fly.io, Render). Seems premature to assess adoption of fly.io when it's barely gotten off the ground.

monus21 4y ago

A compelling successor to both Heroku and App Engine is Google Cloud Run. Dead simple to setup, no frills and cheap to run.

simplehuman 4y ago

It didn't?

craigkerstiens 4y ago

As someone that put a good portion of their working career into helping create Heroku alongside many others, several who contributed way more and had a larger impact, the notion that it failed is probably the first thing that should be up for debate. But because we seem to want to debate this on a weekly basis... Heroku made reproducible builds and deployments a thing at a time people were used to ssh'ing in and scp'ing files around for deployment. While 12factor later become canonized it was built into Heroku since day 1. Heroku was created because you could spend a month building a MVP app in Rails, but then it'd take as long to deploy it as to build it. Deploying software was too hard. And today we're still trying to get back to that, sometimes very unsuccessfully by adding abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer. Did Heroku fail? We're still talking about it over 10 years since being acquired as a gold standard for developer experience. Okay, fine, but it wasn't acquired for something like GitHub... While two very different companies Heroku was acquired nearly 10 years earlier. It was the first large scale acquisition out of YC. I do not know the internals of YC, but it's been commented by others that know it better the exit of Heroku helped greatly YC for the time and place it was. It was a different time. Heroku to this day generates revenue and likely it's different from what people expect. Yeah this one is selfish, but you can largely thank Heroku for Amazon RDS. Way back in the day we had Rails devs asking for a database. We thought how hard could this be, it turns out it was much more work than we expected. We bet on Postgres because one of our engineers said it had a great track record of security and reliability (not playing fast and loose with data semantics)–it was the right choice. Years later when Amazon adding support for Postgres on RDS the team sent some personal notes that essentially said, this is because you made it so in demand. Now... what went wrong. Yes, several people left after the acquisition, some at 2-3 years, some at 4-5 years, some are still there and have been before the acquisition. Acquisition or not when some of the technical and product visionaries leave it's hard to replace that. Adam gave his absolute all, he was spent after. 12factor felt like his going away letter. But that void was never fully filled, some of us may have had a shot of it, but after long runs were also tired. Was Heroku cocky at times toward Salesforce integration, at times yes. At times I don't think was always the case. Did we want to run 20GB J2EE apps when Rails/Django/Node were lighter-weight, of course not. Did we want to login to gus to open a support ticket on a VPN? No. Did we want to move into the SDFC offices that were cube farms vs. large ceilings with a lot of natural lighting?No. But could Salesforce help us make Heroku more available to customers and accelerate adoption? Sure. Could we have focused more on enterprise requirements around security and compliance to reach the enterprise audience? Yep. In retrospect maybe we should have proactively integrated a bit more, I know many of us there at that time feel that way, but there were pockets of integration. I recall hosting the Sayonara team at the Heroku office for a Friday happy hour. We made sure to have it well catered and make them feel as welcome as possible. There was good and bad in the integration, but a common metric of acquisition metrics is how many that are employed at time of acquisition are employed x years later. Heroku had a lot of us still there, 2, 3, 4, 5 and even beyond. Was pricing and business model a factor? Maybe. But I'm not sure you can get what Heroku gives you out of a single employee. I'm excited for what others are building in this space now, but it's not about being a "cheaper" Heroku it's about creating some advancements about easier networking, packaging what defines as an app as multiple services, signed/secure builds.

2c2c2c 4y ago

i started at a company as engineer #1 and my first task was to take an outsourced MVP built on heroku, port it from ruby to python, and make it work on aws. there was seemingly no logical reason to do any of this-- the product was at an early stage with nearly no traffic. even if the product were to become immensely successful, the traffic would probably never require more than a single box. but none of this seemed to matter. nor did the considerable amount of time making things just work. the ceo, who was at one point a technical engineer mind you, just wanted to be able to say his stuff ran on aws situations like this are probably more common than you would think. it's purely a brand recognition thing for them

barbecue_sauce 4y ago
You can't run Ruby on AWS?
- 2c2c2c 4y ago
  ceo did not like ruby. neither did I! I only ever worked with it for the port.
  - barbecue_sauce 4y ago
    I, too, do not like Ruby.
avodonosov 4y ago
As the engineer #1 did you have any equity? If yes, was it OK for you to work on an unreasonable task? Was the company successful after all?
- 2c2c2c 4y ago
  Yes I had equity. I'm fine working on unreasonable things to an extent. On the one hand in an early startup you have a lot of input on how things should work. On the other it can be hard to push hard against an owner's idea when you're in no position of power The company was acquired at an early stage by another private company.

mfer 4y ago

Did Heroku fail? Heroku was the biggest in a long line of developer tools. The PaaS and now FaaS models are still alive and well. A lot of developers want them. I know people are hot on containers and k8s but devs, who need to focus on code and business logic, have poorer productivity when they have to shift into thinking about ops. Heroku inspired a lot including direct competitors (like Cloud Foundry). A lot of money has been made and people jobs make easier. On the flip side, I keep seeing businesses not wanting to invest in developer tools that make their lives easier. PaaS is one of them. Did Salesforce fail to invest in Heroku so it stagnated? How many other places is this happening? Did Heroku make enough money and that was it? There are a lot of unknowns. I think we need more PaaS and FaaS. Make the jobs of developers simpler (hiding the ops complexity).

inferiorhuman 4y ago
> Heroku inspired a lot including direct competitors (like Cloud Foundry). A lot of money has been made and people jobs make easier. Ah Cloud Foundry. Something I drink to forget. CF was the tool Salesforce should've bought or written. Heroku not so much.
- jrudolph 4y ago
  Was it so bad? My experience with it was resoundingly positive, and saw lots of productivity gains with a great developer experience for teams that could build apps with strong guard rails in place. Now everyone and the kitchen sink „needs“ their own kubernetes cluster and operations teams struggle to build complex landing zones for the underlying cloud infrastructure so teams don’t shoot their own foot off all too easily…
  - inferiorhuman 4y ago
    For context: I was at a company that was trying to roll out OpenStack internally (don't do this). Lots of stuff got thrown at the wall in an attempt to find a unified provisioner, nearly all of it terrible. Thankfully my role was that of a consumer. My recollections were that BOSH and CF exposed a ton more complexity than I wanted, and I don't remember there being a great story for deploying Rails apps. But all of these abstraction layers are just like cross-platform GUI toolkits – you're never going to approach the native look and feel or integration. And I don't like the terminology(!) it's all relatively unintuitive to me (e.g. stem cells, deployments, releases). For contrast the Hashicorp stack for our AWS environments (tf+packer+vault) generally felt much more pleasant to deal with, and that's where the comparison to GUI toolkits falls apart I suppose. But… look at all the integrations and enterprisey features that CF+BOSH offer. That's way more of the sort of thing that I'd expect to fit in at Salesforce.

subpixel 4y ago

The author hints more than once at unfulfilled OpenShift potential. I’m not familiar with anything that OpenShift set out to do but failed to realize. Genuinely curious.

anurag 4y ago

> If Heroku and Engine Yard were too early, we would have seen more widespread adoption of next-generation PaaS (e.g., fly.io, Render). Biased take from the founder of one of the next-generation companies mentioned: given how new Render and Fly are as companies and products, it's much more important to look at the growth in their adoption. Render's signups were already growing at a rapid pace, but more than doubled overnight after the Heroku incident; give us a couple more years before judging adoption!

jonfleck 4y ago
Those who aren't adopting are missing out! I've been using Render for a few months now on a postgresql/next.js app and it's really good! Hopefully the new signups continue to accelerate

nickstinemates 4y ago

Heroku changed the world, there's no metric I can fathom that you can point to and say - yep, failure. A great deal of the movement to containers lies on the shoulders of the DevEx that Heroku pioneered. There's a lot of new investment in a lot of new projects; it's cool to see. I hope they carry the torch forward and are successful in their own right. I am looking forward to deploying code on all of them.

bpeebles 4y ago

It hasn't failed. I'm not sure the final outcome of the current debacle but there's still nothing that matches Heroku. I've been using it professionally for 6+ years now and it just works more than most other things I've used. It has its weird limitations but it's... Good. (And I've gone pretty deep into aspects of the buildpacks, how it stores its git repos on S3, and more.)

dubswithus 4y ago
Elastic Beanstalk is a shitshow compared to Heroku. Takes so much time to get an app to work.

the__alchemist 4y ago

Am I missing something? Should I be moving my websites off Heroku?

glenngillen 4y ago

I was a relatively early Heroku employee, though still technically started _after_ the acquisition. I've spent the much of the last 10 years hoping that I once again get to be part of such a failure. It's such a rare opportunity to work with an amazing team of talented people who set a new standard for what a great developer experience is, how simple it should be to run containerized workloads, that a robust build pipeline can actually be easy to use, setting the precedent for what a tightly integrated SaaS ecosystem/marketplace looks like, review apps, buildpacks... things that improved the lives for literally millions of developers. And even a decade later continue to set the bar for what many aspire to. An amazing legacy to have a product that has been so relevant for so long in what is such a fast moving industry. I wish everyone got to be part of such a failure at least once in their careers. It's something I'll cherish for the rest of my days.

tootie 4y ago
People still use it as a benchmark. I see products marketed like "Heroku for mobile apps" and the like. It's the gold standard for PaaS even when it doesn't work.
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- hackernewds 4y ago
  Why?
bjeanes 4y ago
Agree 100%. Also, thanks for hiring me into Heroku at the time, even if it's behind both of us now <3

throw_m239339 4y ago

Heroku didn't fail in the sense that it put emphasis on developer experience when it comes to SAAS + the market place model for services. So it didn't fail, it was just successfully copied by the competition, like Azure or Google Cloud.

zoomzoom 4y ago

First - as others have done, I think we have to challenge the premise that Heroku failed. It's still the gold standard 15 years later and the default for many knowledgable folks. Obviously given the hype around k8s and the order of magnitude difference between the success of the hyperscalers and the scale of Heroku, there's some mismatch btetween what they did and the potential they had. I would say the same about App Engine and AWS's various iterations starting with Elastic Beanstalk. Overall if we had to bucket the opportunity that still exists to do better in the space, I think it aligned with wrong product and something better than "git push heroku" better than with business model, whole product, or timing (which clearly had a role). Business model is an issue but not against stuff like render, the success of which also pushes against whole product (people are still adopting something very similar). Agree with craigkerstiens that the next iteration is about apps vs. services, extensibility, and blending different service types (frontend/container/serverless/data) more fully than Heroku (which really only has one type of app) was able to. And is also about lifecycle and SDLC completeness (which helps a lot with security and compliance, too). As I mention on all these Heroku threads lately, I'm the cofounder of Coherence (www.withcoherence.com) where I think we're taking an interesting stab at what the future looks like here, using first principles to go deeper than other PaaS and integrate dev more deeply, along with more support for extensibility.

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obiefernandez 4y ago

What the actual fuck? Other than the recent Github debacle, Heroku has been one of my favorite and most consistently used services for over a decade. The notion that it failed is ridiculous.

ilaksh 4y ago

WTF is he talking about? They were acquired for $212 million. One of the most popular services like it ever. I am going to flag this post.

hthrowaway5 4y ago
12 years ago! Heroku of 2010 was a success. Heroku of 2015 was a success. Heroku of 2022 is a zombie of its former self headed straight towards implosion.

xcskier56 4y ago

It didn’t fail for me. If hosting my first app/mvp hadn’t been so simple, I’m not sure I would have kept going down the software development path; and for that, I’m incredibly grateful.

gtirloni 4y ago

Since when Heroku failed? It's one of those articles that maybe went too extreme with clickbait title that's so off-putting that I don't even bother to open.

lewisjoe 4y ago

Early user here. One of the very first apps I ever built ran on heroku. Thanks for that experience. Heroku taught me deployments can be a single day effort during a time when I didn't even know deployments usually are more difficult than that. I'm just grateful Heroku existed at that point of my life :)

nomilk 4y ago

> why haven't they figured out how to make it viable Any data to support this? I suspect Heroku is immensely profitable on account of its huge user base (4th largest cloud provider after AWS, Azure, and GCP), and very healthy profit margins.

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nomilk 4y ago

Reminds me of a Sam Altman quote about Airbnb: > for all that people worry and for all that the press loves to say, 'Ah, this happened; this thing is over,' and whip themselves up in this frenzy, it never actually kills the startup. It's a problem; people love to talk about it. And there's this schadenfreude of loving to hate on someone's perceived missteps or someone's problem. So people love to talk about it. But then they go back and they book AirBnB for their next vacation. Econtalk Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAYXUgNHHc4&t=16m25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAYXUgNHHc4&t=16m25s

nso95 4y ago

Looks like it's still up and running, not sure that qualifies as a failure

number6 4y ago
I remember when you just git pushed to heroku and your stuff magically was a working deploy. Later there was docker and after setting up your CI/CD you had almost the same heroku experience with half of the costs. As deployment became easier there was no need for heroku. Is was killed by Docker. Yeah you still can use it. But sure it's pricey...

lifeplusplus 4y ago

Only thing heroku fail at was not becoming more cheap but other than it's good as it gets

pc2g4d 4y ago

Current paying Heroku customer, so... feels successful enough to me!

jspash 4y ago
Same here, however... What I love about HN is the exposure to new ideas and suggestions. I've seen suggested here that fly.io is a cheaper alternative that people rave about. I had a quick look at their site and so far I like what I see. So come Monday morning I'm going to add a ticket to the dev queue: Investigate moving from Heroku -> Fly.io We'll look at the pros and cons. Pricing. Ease of use. etc. The usual. And my gut tells me that heroku might be losing yet one more customer and the tens of thousands per year that my company is currently spending with them. We're a small team, so it was decided to spend the money on a PaaS instead of a large ops team. It's worked well enough for the past 15 years. So maybe time to move?

sq1020 4y ago

Does Matz still work at Heroku?

nunez 4y ago

> Containers (introduced in 2013) also changed DevOps and software deployment landscape. Yet, container-native PaaS (e.g., OpenShift) also failed. If being in every Fortune 100 company running some of the world's largest containerized platforms in production is failure, I want to fail like that

evoxmusic 4y ago

Heroku didn't failed, they have been a huge innovative solution for a world generation in of developers. As a CEO and developer myself, I do believe that the next gen platform would be based on a similar experience as Heroku, but on top of the best cloud service providers. E.g: Qovery.com is the Heroku-like experience on top of AWS (I am co-founder of Qovery)

unixhero 4y ago

Has Heroku failed? I. checked its website and they seem to be operating nominally.

M0r13n 4y ago

Are there any real alternatives to Heroku for small to medium sized projects? I am talking about projects with only one or two engineers. Those engineers likely focus on providing value for the customer by improving the actual product itself. Instead of taking care of deploying their project on AWS, which is quite complex, if you do not use it regularly. I am myself maintaining a custom built webshop/ERP system for a local company that repairs smartphones. I barely find enough time to maintain the actual code. If I would have to dig through the weeds on AWS the project would definitely be dead right now. Instead I just "git push heroku main" and I am done. I can also provision a database or Redis through the UI, without having to worry that I made a mistake that could cost me thousands of Dollars.

emerongi 4y ago
- render.com - fly.dev I'm sure there's others, these are just the ones I happen to remember at the moment.
krajzeg 4y ago
Migrated a small production Node app from Heroku to Render recently due to costs and that security debacle. Render is pretty much on the same level when it comes to convenience (push-to-deploy, etc.), but they're a bit more limited in what they support. They do have some features that Heroku doesn't have. The migration took me ~1 hour altogether. - For languages, they support less stuff than Heroku (unless you're willing to do Docker yourself). - For DBs, they can do Postgres or Redis on their end, other stuff is on you if you need it. - Out-of-the-box metrics don't include basic stuff such as requests-per-sec or http status codes, so you do have to plug something external in for that. + HTTPS on custom domain using LetsEncrypt was a breeze and free. + They have "disks", which is a persistent filesystem for your app. Very useful if a normal FS is better than a DB for any of your things (image processing in my case).
belfalas 4y ago
App Platform from Digital Ocean is not as full-featured as Heroku but you can tell they are building towards parity. Good pricing and thus far no real hiccups for us in 1 year of usage.

rsecora 4y ago

Being there, price move me out. The selling point was easy and reproducible deployment. But there are must cheaper alternatives, and dynos productivity didn't have enough benefits for the cost.

krajzeg 4y ago

This title seems very premature, and the article itself doesn't justify it well. While there are reasons to not use Heroku (pricing, the security debacle) and be annoyed with them, I don't see any signs of them losing their position in their sector of the market yet. They are still the go-to if you're in the "small-size project, don't want hassle, set up everything for me please" space. They might lose that position in the future due to many missteps, but at this point it's like asking "why did Microsoft fail?". It didn't. It might not be what it was, but it's still a pretty successful concern, and same goes for Heroku. Having alternatives is very cool. I did migrate an app to Render, motivated by Heroku's recent security woes. But in the process of doing so, I realized that Heroku has accumulated a lot of plugins, conveniences etc. over the years. If Heroku dropped their prices to be a bit less egregious, I probably wouldn't bother moving. It will take quite a while before anybody can match them on convenience, and eg. Render is definitely not there yet - it has the basics down and done right, and if the basics are enough for you, it'll work. But a lot of things you get out of the box one-click support for in Heroku will be a manual setup on the alternative PaaSes, with a community wiki article to guide you at best.

hthrowaway5 4y ago
The only way they're going to succeed is if sfdc quadruples (or more) their headcount. We were struggling with product development and maintenance with the skeleton crew we had back in 2015 and probably had 3x as many people then.

abalone 4y ago

Two reasons: * expensive to scale * developer limitations This limited it to smaller scale projects, MVPs, proof of concepts where paying a little more for a certain range of developer productivity makes sense. Such is the case with rapid development platforms in general. When you grow you shift to wholesale-priced primitives that give you more control.

WhyNotHugo 4y ago

I worked at a few small shops that initially used Heroku. The story in all of them was the same: Heroku is nice and simple to start with the free/lower plans, but gets too expensive as you grow a bit more. Once we'd grown past the free/lower plans, we'd move on to somewhere else, that required a bit more work, but was substantially cheaper and way more flexible. Also an issue was a reproducible environment for several devs. Using docker became super easy, but this didn't translate well into Heroku. We either needed to maintain buildpacks and dockerfiles in sync, or move to a platform where we ran docker. Not sure if this has changed since, but this was also a big reason to move elsewhere.

kamrani 4y ago

Cloud has almost completely replaced the old datacenters however still the teams are spending a lot of time and money on managing it. Heroku solved the problem very well for years but it's very costly and limiting at the same time. Now it's time to replace Heroku with services that help you use the cloud providers which leads to substantial cost savings. We're very soon launching https://www.utopiops.com https://www.utopiops.com which is an alternative for Heroku on AWS to address this particular issue.

sfc32 4y ago

Who said it failed? Heroku might be a bit long in the tooth, but has a solid company behind it and it a lot easier than fooling around with Capistrano, Ansible or heaven-help-us Kubernetes. Trust me, I've tried them all, and for a fairly standard Rails app Heroku just works. The lack of HTTP2 is a bit embarrassing though.

Komodai 4y ago

Terrible take, Heroku didn't fail.