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After the Salesforce takeover? The one in 2010? So Heroku was good in like a year!?

by Max-q 4y ago

hot_gril 4y ago
Heh. I always loved Heroku and have complained that Salesforce is messing it up recently, but turns out the first time I used Heroku was like 5 years after the acquisition. I think Salesforce just started inserting their own branding more recently.
- mst 4y ago
  At a guess, Salesforce bought it hoping it would take over the entire space rather than merely having the capacity to be one profitable provider among many, and lost interest once it became clear it was going to be the latter rather than the former. (guess based only on having watched things unfold from the outside without ever being a user/customer so please do add salt to taste)
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    As a customer with no knowledge of the inside, this is all I've noticed, which probably misses some things: 1. GitHub integration breach, which wasn't handled well but luckily didn't affect me. 2. No more free-tier DBs :( 3. Salesforce logo, which ofc doesn't matter. Hearing vague negative things here makes me nervous about the future because I really like Heroku and don't want to be stuck using AWS directly.
    - mst 4y ago
      A service can run in a state of if not benevolent, then at least ambivalent, neglect for quite some time without it being a disaster for the users. I would suggest you start poking around at possible alternatives just in case, but not as yet with any great sense of urgency. If you Ctrl-F for crunchydata in this comment section you'll find an employee of theirs talking about their postgres hosting and listing a bunch of services their customer use for the other parts of the puzzle, and have hired enough heavyweight core contributors and active and clueful community members that I think it's reasonable to say they're -good- at postgres. I would say that what I expect to be most likely to happen is gradually increasing prices and gradually degrading service (the people still working on it do seem to care but I don't know if there are enough of them left to avoid bitrot setting in and even if there are today, in a year or two there may not be) so having a plan to move in an orderly fashion but not executing it yet seems like the wise approach. Neither panicking and moving in a fast and risky way now, nor waiting until (if it happens) things go from aggravating to actively intolerable and moving in a fast and risky way then, are likely to be particularly good ideas. OTOH, being prepared to migrate elsewhere in an olderly fashion if the cost/benefit calculations tell you it's time, re-running those calculations and double checking your plan every so often, and continuing to enjoy the service in the mean time, seems like a reasonable, responsible, and overall relatively pleasant way forwards. (disclaimer: I am not a Heroku user myself, but I think the general principles almost certainly apply here just fine, and I'd certainly be comfortable giving the same advice to a consultancy client at work, so without being foolish enough to claim I'm definitely right I'd suggest the above analysis is at least worthy of giving serious consideration to)
      - hot_gril 4y ago
        Luckily I keep to basic ways of hosting things, so if the time comes to move, I should be able to. Replicated NodeJS web backend with a Postgres DB is gonna be supported in tons of places. No special logging, just stdout. Some cronjobs an outbound HTTPS requests, that's typical. The most unusual thing I do is open an SSH tunnel to some Linux server if there's a special long-running process I need to call RPCs on.
strix_varius 4y ago
Ex-Herokai here. In some sense, SFDC didn't start taking over H until several years after we were acquired. We had our own CEO, office, mission, org structure, annual meetup, etc. Then, year by year, those things were taken away. Eventually, circa 2018, investment in the core H product started being reduced and individuals and teams started being reorged to focus on Salesforce priorities. H became a "keeping the lights on" job. Folks who wanted to keep pushing left to work on GitHub actions or on render.com, netlify, other places still striving for great devex.

After the Salesforce takeover? The one in 2010? So Heroku was good in like a year!?

by Max-q 4y ago

After the Salesforce takeover? The one in 2010? So Heroku was good in like a year!?

Heh. I always loved Heroku and have complained that Salesforce is messing it up recently, but turns out the first time I used Heroku was like 5 years after the acquisition. I think Salesforce just started inserting their own branding more recently.

mst 4y ago
At a guess, Salesforce bought it hoping it would take over the entire space rather than merely having the capacity to be one profitable provider among many, and lost interest once it became clear it was going to be the latter rather than the former. (guess based only on having watched things unfold from the outside without ever being a user/customer so please do add salt to taste)
- hot_gril 4y ago
  As a customer with no knowledge of the inside, this is all I've noticed, which probably misses some things: 1. GitHub integration breach, which wasn't handled well but luckily didn't affect me. 2. No more free-tier DBs :( 3. Salesforce logo, which ofc doesn't matter. Hearing vague negative things here makes me nervous about the future because I really like Heroku and don't want to be stuck using AWS directly.
  - mst 4y ago
    A service can run in a state of if not benevolent, then at least ambivalent, neglect for quite some time without it being a disaster for the users. I would suggest you start poking around at possible alternatives just in case, but not as yet with any great sense of urgency. If you Ctrl-F for crunchydata in this comment section you'll find an employee of theirs talking about their postgres hosting and listing a bunch of services their customer use for the other parts of the puzzle, and have hired enough heavyweight core contributors and active and clueful community members that I think it's reasonable to say they're -good- at postgres. I would say that what I expect to be most likely to happen is gradually increasing prices and gradually degrading service (the people still working on it do seem to care but I don't know if there are enough of them left to avoid bitrot setting in and even if there are today, in a year or two there may not be) so having a plan to move in an orderly fashion but not executing it yet seems like the wise approach. Neither panicking and moving in a fast and risky way now, nor waiting until (if it happens) things go from aggravating to actively intolerable and moving in a fast and risky way then, are likely to be particularly good ideas. OTOH, being prepared to migrate elsewhere in an olderly fashion if the cost/benefit calculations tell you it's time, re-running those calculations and double checking your plan every so often, and continuing to enjoy the service in the mean time, seems like a reasonable, responsible, and overall relatively pleasant way forwards. (disclaimer: I am not a Heroku user myself, but I think the general principles almost certainly apply here just fine, and I'd certainly be comfortable giving the same advice to a consultancy client at work, so without being foolish enough to claim I'm definitely right I'd suggest the above analysis is at least worthy of giving serious consideration to)
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      Luckily I keep to basic ways of hosting things, so if the time comes to move, I should be able to. Replicated NodeJS web backend with a Postgres DB is gonna be supported in tons of places. No special logging, just stdout. Some cronjobs an outbound HTTPS requests, that's typical. The most unusual thing I do is open an SSH tunnel to some Linux server if there's a special long-running process I need to call RPCs on.

strix_varius 4y ago

Ex-Herokai here. In some sense, SFDC didn't start taking over H until several years after we were acquired. We had our own CEO, office, mission, org structure, annual meetup, etc. Then, year by year, those things were taken away. Eventually, circa 2018, investment in the core H product started being reduced and individuals and teams started being reorged to focus on Salesforce priorities. H became a "keeping the lights on" job. Folks who wanted to keep pushing left to work on GitHub actions or on render.com, netlify, other places still striving for great devex.