5 ms·

Heroku: Core Impact

181 points by craigkerstiens 4y ago

mardix 4y ago
Heroku is getting hammered like crazy on HN this week
- vmception 4y ago
  It is very strange
  - Trasmatta 4y ago
    The ongoing security incident has caused a cascading series of former Heroku employees to come out sharing their perspective. Not too strange given the circumstances.
- sdklkejflkwjefl 4y ago
  It was really something special: it transcended what most software is capable of because of a lot of grit and talent. I cried when Periwinkle was leaked: that's when the writing was on the wall and even the most optimistic of us realized we were doomed. I appreciate the community seems to care about our story so much.
- ryanSrich 4y ago
  Rightfully so. They’ve been completely silent on the GitHub integration and when it might be restored. It’s also extremely difficult to migrate off of Heroku. It’s either stay in Heroku and hope it doesn’t implode further, or higher a DevOps person to wrangle K8s on GCP or AWS. It’s a nightmare and there really aren’t any alternatives to Heroku (I don’t care what anyone says about render or fly. They aren’t there yet).
  - sofixa 4y ago
    Depending on your specific requirements, take a look at AWS Elastic Beanstalk, or GCP Cloud Run (some glue required for the latter). If you do end up going the DIY route, maybe take a look at Nomad before k8s, it's drastically easier. Disclaimer: i work at HashiCorp, but i've been blogging about this for years before joining (blog link in bio).
    - jiggawatts 4y ago
      Azure App Service also... It's odd how whenever someone on HN mentions a list of cloud providers, they will list Google, IBM, and even Oracle before Microsoft Azure, which is the #2 biggest provider after Amazon. It's like when a parent lists their children and just "forgets" their second child. "Oh, we don't talk about Timmy..."
      - sofixa 4y ago
        To be fair, Azure has a bad reputation among non-"enterprise" folks ( the type of person who swears by IBM, Oracle, Cisco, etc.). I've only experimented with it briefly and it was underwhelming at best, and all of the things I've read and heard about it don't make me want it. Be it general slowness, really poor UI and UX, or terrible security vulnerabilities. No cloud is perfect, but Azure seems to be the least perfect of the big ones.
      - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
        Totally agree that it's strange. I hate Microsoft MORE than the next guy. I will never get over the company they were in the 90's, and funding the SCO lawsuit against IBM. And I view the warm, fuzzy "Linux-friendly" Microsoft with high-levels of skepticism. That all being said, I have a couple of larg-ish, cross-departmental apps running on Azure infra, and I find their portal to be very good; a mile ahead of futzing around in AWS. (Of course, I understand that AWS was designed to be CLI-friendly first, but I don't need to deploy fleets of similar objects at a time.) So I can't fault Microsoft for Azure. I actually like it. One of my apps is a Rails app (with all the attendant nonsense) and one is the backend of a Windows-native app, and the integration with Visual Studio for deploying services to their cloud really is nice.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        my69thaccount 4y ago
        > I hate Microsoft MORE than the next guy. > So I can't fault Microsoft for Azure. I actually like it. You literally do not hate microsoft more than the next guy
  - cpursley 4y ago
    We were able to migrate from Heroku to Render.com in less than a day. And they are absolutely there, plus some.
    - devoutsalsa 4y ago
      How non-trivial is your app?
      - cpursley 4y ago
        React SPA front end. Hasura for GraphQL. Distributed Elixir (which Render handles brilliantly and Heroku is not even capable of). Also an old Rails app with web server & background job server. I use RDS on AWS because I'm doing some weird stuff that Render hosted Postgres can't handle, but nor can Heroku Postgres.
    - ryanSrich 4y ago
      I should have been more clear. It’s not impossible because the physical act of migrating. It’s impossible because so many other platforms are missing tablestakes features (HA Postgres with auto backups as an example).
- avl999 4y ago
  I have never used Heroku so I have no dog in this fight but it oddly seems like a weird smear campaign, esp accompanied by threads promoting it's competitors and all these weird brand new 'throwaway' accounts posting in these threads. I get that they have an ongoing issue but a month ago Jira had a multiple weeks long outage and it basically only got like 1-2 threads total that made it to the front page that I saw (one about the initial outage and one the postmortem).
emilsedgh 4y ago
In another HN thread last week a former employee also posted this, which I think was mostly missed as he was pretty late to the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356546 Which may be interesting since the Heroku conversation is hot right now.
- password4321 4y ago
  Checks out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31291324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31291324
sdklkejflkwjefl 4y ago
Brandur I think you left just before we started to have real headcount problems which I blame for our demise. I agree with pretty much everything you said but I think the technical and product problems you bring up were actually symptoms, not causes. A few more people and we could've properly maintained the stacks. We should've had an entire team if not department dedicated to thinking about Docker. If I recall it was a part-time concern for like 2 of the language engineers (who had a ton of work on their plates). Heroku should not have stopped at Cedar: it should've been the one to build something akin to k8s but with good DevEx. As far as why we had headcount problems: it's because sfdc gave up on us. See Craig[0] and Adam[1]'s comments for more on that. We certainly did though: sfdc would have entire teams dedicated to similar roles we would have individuals handling part-time. Salesforce folks would tell you we were cocky assholes and they were right—but we also worked damn hard. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373394 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373300
xnx 4y ago
Salesforce should sell Heroku to Google or AWS.
- case 4y ago
  Or Azure / GitHub.
  - jaxn 4y ago
    Azure/Github seems to be getting close to a buildpacks 2.0 kind of thing with devcontainers.
- giorgioz 4y ago
  Cloudflare and Vercel are companies that they are pushing innovation like Heroku did in the early days.
- flurdy 4y ago
  Selling it to anyone will be difficult. Way too much legacy, and lost context. It would be a quagmire of inertia to shift anything. As with most tech "giants"/"unicorns" that are past their zenith. Most likely any buyers would kill off/sunset most of it, and gain a lot of negativity. Not going to happen. More likely is the rumours of it being rolled/rebranded/de-labelled into a Salesforce offering, and quietly sunset large chunks of it (which would be less noticeable than if any new buyers did so).
Twirrim 4y ago
> One of the things Patrick would assiduously list as an existential threat to the success of Stripe was a major security incident When I worked at AWS, the thing I heard most frequently repeated in relation to security was "We don't want a front page of the NYT event." There's probably a good argument that AWS or Amazon would survive a "front page of the NYT" event (after all, we've seen Target etc do so), but the spirit of the phrase still resonates.
- ryanSrich 4y ago
  This is one of the main things we cover in all of our security awareness training. Yes, breaching data is worst case scenario and can be devastating to individual users, but it’s often the brand that takes the hardest hit.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    I wish security trainings didn't do that. I always find it appalling that "the brand" is pictured as of comparable importance as customer data.
    - ryanSrich 4y ago
      You’re missing the point. It’s not to show that the brand is more important than user data, it’s to show that security events are multifaceted. You want employees to avoid making mistakes that lead to security events. Showing all the ways those events can fuck things up is the point.
      - adrianN 4y ago
        Well, all problems are multifaceted. If I had to take trainings about how not to spill toxic waste in local rivers, I would not find it appropriate to mention damage to the brand either even though the brand certainly would suffer from such an event.
        iamben 4y ago
giorgioz 4y ago
> Selling to Salesforce for $212 million was an obvious win NO! I always thought the very opposite. Selling Heroku to Salesforce was a mistake. Heroku should have cannibalized it's own dyno pricing and follow AWS Lambda with 100ms increments pricing. And after that do what Cloudflare is doing today.
- my69thaccount 4y ago
  Compared to the prices people talk about today $212m is nothing for a whole company, the individual founder could make more than that.
kamrani 4y ago
Heroku *was* fantastic, but for some reason it just stayed where it was for years. We're launching https://www.utopiops.com https://www.utopiops.com, a platform that can be replacement for Heroku on your own AWS. We support ECS, EKS and static websites. We're working closely with our early users to tailor the services based on their specific requirements. If anyone is interested in a demo, or a trial happy to provide more details.

Heroku is getting hammered like crazy on HN this week

vmception 4y ago
It is very strange
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  The ongoing security incident has caused a cascading series of former Heroku employees to come out sharing their perspective. Not too strange given the circumstances.
sdklkejflkwjefl 4y ago
It was really something special: it transcended what most software is capable of because of a lot of grit and talent. I cried when Periwinkle was leaked: that's when the writing was on the wall and even the most optimistic of us realized we were doomed. I appreciate the community seems to care about our story so much.
ryanSrich 4y ago
Rightfully so. They’ve been completely silent on the GitHub integration and when it might be restored. It’s also extremely difficult to migrate off of Heroku. It’s either stay in Heroku and hope it doesn’t implode further, or higher a DevOps person to wrangle K8s on GCP or AWS. It’s a nightmare and there really aren’t any alternatives to Heroku (I don’t care what anyone says about render or fly. They aren’t there yet).
- sofixa 4y ago
  Depending on your specific requirements, take a look at AWS Elastic Beanstalk, or GCP Cloud Run (some glue required for the latter). If you do end up going the DIY route, maybe take a look at Nomad before k8s, it's drastically easier. Disclaimer: i work at HashiCorp, but i've been blogging about this for years before joining (blog link in bio).
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    Azure App Service also... It's odd how whenever someone on HN mentions a list of cloud providers, they will list Google, IBM, and even Oracle before Microsoft Azure, which is the #2 biggest provider after Amazon. It's like when a parent lists their children and just "forgets" their second child. "Oh, we don't talk about Timmy..."
    - sofixa 4y ago
      To be fair, Azure has a bad reputation among non-"enterprise" folks ( the type of person who swears by IBM, Oracle, Cisco, etc.). I've only experimented with it briefly and it was underwhelming at best, and all of the things I've read and heard about it don't make me want it. Be it general slowness, really poor UI and UX, or terrible security vulnerabilities. No cloud is perfect, but Azure seems to be the least perfect of the big ones.
    - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
      Totally agree that it's strange. I hate Microsoft MORE than the next guy. I will never get over the company they were in the 90's, and funding the SCO lawsuit against IBM. And I view the warm, fuzzy "Linux-friendly" Microsoft with high-levels of skepticism. That all being said, I have a couple of larg-ish, cross-departmental apps running on Azure infra, and I find their portal to be very good; a mile ahead of futzing around in AWS. (Of course, I understand that AWS was designed to be CLI-friendly first, but I don't need to deploy fleets of similar objects at a time.) So I can't fault Microsoft for Azure. I actually like it. One of my apps is a Rails app (with all the attendant nonsense) and one is the backend of a Windows-native app, and the integration with Visual Studio for deploying services to their cloud really is nice.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - my69thaccount 4y ago
        > I hate Microsoft MORE than the next guy. > So I can't fault Microsoft for Azure. I actually like it. You literally do not hate microsoft more than the next guy
- cpursley 4y ago
  We were able to migrate from Heroku to Render.com in less than a day. And they are absolutely there, plus some.
  - devoutsalsa 4y ago
    How non-trivial is your app?
    - cpursley 4y ago
      React SPA front end. Hasura for GraphQL. Distributed Elixir (which Render handles brilliantly and Heroku is not even capable of). Also an old Rails app with web server & background job server. I use RDS on AWS because I'm doing some weird stuff that Render hosted Postgres can't handle, but nor can Heroku Postgres.
  - ryanSrich 4y ago
    I should have been more clear. It’s not impossible because the physical act of migrating. It’s impossible because so many other platforms are missing tablestakes features (HA Postgres with auto backups as an example).
avl999 4y ago
I have never used Heroku so I have no dog in this fight but it oddly seems like a weird smear campaign, esp accompanied by threads promoting it's competitors and all these weird brand new 'throwaway' accounts posting in these threads. I get that they have an ongoing issue but a month ago Jira had a multiple weeks long outage and it basically only got like 1-2 threads total that made it to the front page that I saw (one about the initial outage and one the postmortem).

In another HN thread last week a former employee also posted this, which I think was mostly missed as he was pretty late to the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356546 Which may be interesting since the Heroku conversation is hot right now.

password4321 4y ago
Checks out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31291324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31291324

sdklkejflkwjefl 4y ago

Brandur I think you left just before we started to have real headcount problems which I blame for our demise. I agree with pretty much everything you said but I think the technical and product problems you bring up were actually symptoms, not causes. A few more people and we could've properly maintained the stacks. We should've had an entire team if not department dedicated to thinking about Docker. If I recall it was a part-time concern for like 2 of the language engineers (who had a ton of work on their plates). Heroku should not have stopped at Cedar: it should've been the one to build something akin to k8s but with good DevEx. As far as why we had headcount problems: it's because sfdc gave up on us. See Craig[0] and Adam[1]'s comments for more on that. We certainly did though: sfdc would have entire teams dedicated to similar roles we would have individuals handling part-time. Salesforce folks would tell you we were cocky assholes and they were right—but we also worked damn hard. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373394 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373300

xnx 4y ago

Salesforce should sell Heroku to Google or AWS.

case 4y ago
Or Azure / GitHub.
- jaxn 4y ago
  Azure/Github seems to be getting close to a buildpacks 2.0 kind of thing with devcontainers.
giorgioz 4y ago
Cloudflare and Vercel are companies that they are pushing innovation like Heroku did in the early days.
flurdy 4y ago
Selling it to anyone will be difficult. Way too much legacy, and lost context. It would be a quagmire of inertia to shift anything. As with most tech "giants"/"unicorns" that are past their zenith. Most likely any buyers would kill off/sunset most of it, and gain a lot of negativity. Not going to happen. More likely is the rumours of it being rolled/rebranded/de-labelled into a Salesforce offering, and quietly sunset large chunks of it (which would be less noticeable than if any new buyers did so).

Twirrim 4y ago

> One of the things Patrick would assiduously list as an existential threat to the success of Stripe was a major security incident When I worked at AWS, the thing I heard most frequently repeated in relation to security was "We don't want a front page of the NYT event." There's probably a good argument that AWS or Amazon would survive a "front page of the NYT" event (after all, we've seen Target etc do so), but the spirit of the phrase still resonates.

ryanSrich 4y ago
This is one of the main things we cover in all of our security awareness training. Yes, breaching data is worst case scenario and can be devastating to individual users, but it’s often the brand that takes the hardest hit.
- adrianN 4y ago
  I wish security trainings didn't do that. I always find it appalling that "the brand" is pictured as of comparable importance as customer data.
  - ryanSrich 4y ago
    You’re missing the point. It’s not to show that the brand is more important than user data, it’s to show that security events are multifaceted. You want employees to avoid making mistakes that lead to security events. Showing all the ways those events can fuck things up is the point.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Well, all problems are multifaceted. If I had to take trainings about how not to spill toxic waste in local rivers, I would not find it appropriate to mention damage to the brand either even though the brand certainly would suffer from such an event.
      - iamben 4y ago

giorgioz 4y ago

> Selling to Salesforce for $212 million was an obvious win NO! I always thought the very opposite. Selling Heroku to Salesforce was a mistake. Heroku should have cannibalized it's own dyno pricing and follow AWS Lambda with 100ms increments pricing. And after that do what Cloudflare is doing today.

my69thaccount 4y ago
Compared to the prices people talk about today $212m is nothing for a whole company, the individual founder could make more than that.

kamrani 4y ago

Heroku *was* fantastic, but for some reason it just stayed where it was for years. We're launching https://www.utopiops.com https://www.utopiops.com, a platform that can be replacement for Heroku on your own AWS. We support ECS, EKS and static websites. We're working closely with our early users to tailor the services based on their specific requirements. If anyone is interested in a demo, or a trial happy to provide more details.