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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

by 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.)

by bko 4y ago

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.)