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Simply to get an idea of how Heroku plans to sunset projects/platforms. Making the jump from free to paid not only means a commitment from you but also from th

by DASD 14y ago

Simply to get an idea of how Heroku plans to sunset projects/platforms. Making the jump from free to paid not only means a commitment from you but also from the payer. Granted most apps are easily migrated but I'm curious how many apps were done by small(or outsourced) staff where the owner just expects the app to "just work...for a long,long time." Hence, the reason why Microsoft has such wonderfully(or excruciatingly) long support lifetimes. I don't have a paid application so maybe you've touched on some of this in your letter and also details of the extension support you mentioned. You sent this from a personal account? Meaning...not @heroku.com? Is there no formal notification/support e-mail that Heroku uses?

thinkbohemian 14y ago
I sent out the notification from my @heroku.com email, and not from an auto mailer. We have the capability and do send out system wide emails, but I wanted to personally field any questions or concerns directly. No one has indicated that they cannot migrate their app at all. A few have told me that they are not the original developers, but we haven't run into that exact situation. We do have http://partners.heroku.com http://partners.heroku.com available for contract if someone truly was non-technical. Even then, the experience of hiring contractors for a few hours to work on an app that has been running for the last 4+ years shouldn't be too bad. Even in microsoft's case, longer support lifetimes still don't mean infinite support lifetimes. People still need to migrate and un-necessarily prolonging the migration can make it much-much harder. To read up more on our deprecation and sunsetting policies check out my last blog post: http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/9/24/sunsetting-and-deprecation/ http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/9/24/sunsetting-and-dep...
- DASD 14y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to respond. The ability to shutoff technology/features is definitely a plus when you are running a PAAS. I've still got clients that are running large lab operations on NT and also some clients still running extremely old versions of RPG. None have found the incentive to rewrite the software along the way.
nthj 14y ago
Before Heroku, "just works... for a long, long time" meant "for a few weeks until the database goes down, or the firewall needs to be patched, or, something," and you have to bring in a $150/hour consultant to figure out what went wrong. If you paid Heroku an enterprise-level $10k/month for "just works, for a long, long time", I'm sure they'd gladly dispatch a Rails' consultant to handle the migration for you, and you'd never hear about it. $50/month does not buy you "works for next 3 decades" technology. A business owner would gladly take "3 hours of stack migration every few years" over requiring a high-dollar consultant every few weeks, especially since the consultant probably comes with a retainer he has to pay whether he has problems or not. [also, I'm sure the personal account was a bob@heroku.com address, vs a support@heroku.com address.]
- DASD 14y ago
  Thanks. Please see my response to thinkbohemian's comments. My point is that using a PAAS illustrates some sacrifices a customer has to make if they've traditionally been accustomed to hosting their own infrastructure. Some customers are simply not aware of expectations they might need to change. Nothing more or less than that. I'm not sure bob@heroku.com helps me here unless I was previously introduced to Bob from a notification of a general support e-mail. Again, I'm speaking without paid Heroku experience here but to me it seems the equivalent of a "Hiya guys!" greeting. Heroku is owned by Salesforce which describes itself as an "enterprise cloud computing company."
  - nthj 14y ago
    sure, that tracks. I think our main difference is over whether or not the stacks are fundamentally the same. The legacy apps can still run the same Rails version, can still run the same Ruby version, and can still deploy using `git push,` it's just a more powerful abstraction. To me, this migration feels like the equivalent of "Oh hey, you've gotta upgrade your database version and download a few security patches for your OS", which any enterprise-level company is going to be more than familiar with. It's not like they came out and said "well bugger, we don't support Rails 2 anymore, you gotta rewrite all your app code to work in Rails 3." I would understand any frustration then. shrugs

by DASD 14y ago

thinkbohemian 14y ago

I sent out the notification from my @heroku.com email, and not from an auto mailer. We have the capability and do send out system wide emails, but I wanted to personally field any questions or concerns directly. No one has indicated that they cannot migrate their app at all. A few have told me that they are not the original developers, but we haven't run into that exact situation. We do have http://partners.heroku.com http://partners.heroku.com available for contract if someone truly was non-technical. Even then, the experience of hiring contractors for a few hours to work on an app that has been running for the last 4+ years shouldn't be too bad. Even in microsoft's case, longer support lifetimes still don't mean infinite support lifetimes. People still need to migrate and un-necessarily prolonging the migration can make it much-much harder. To read up more on our deprecation and sunsetting policies check out my last blog post: http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/9/24/sunsetting-and-deprecation/ http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/9/24/sunsetting-and-dep...

DASD 14y ago
Thanks for taking the time to respond. The ability to shutoff technology/features is definitely a plus when you are running a PAAS. I've still got clients that are running large lab operations on NT and also some clients still running extremely old versions of RPG. None have found the incentive to rewrite the software along the way.

nthj 14y ago

Before Heroku, "just works... for a long, long time" meant "for a few weeks until the database goes down, or the firewall needs to be patched, or, something," and you have to bring in a $150/hour consultant to figure out what went wrong. If you paid Heroku an enterprise-level $10k/month for "just works, for a long, long time", I'm sure they'd gladly dispatch a Rails' consultant to handle the migration for you, and you'd never hear about it. $50/month does not buy you "works for next 3 decades" technology. A business owner would gladly take "3 hours of stack migration every few years" over requiring a high-dollar consultant every few weeks, especially since the consultant probably comes with a retainer he has to pay whether he has problems or not. [also, I'm sure the personal account was a bob@heroku.com address, vs a support@heroku.com address.]

DASD 14y ago
Thanks. Please see my response to thinkbohemian's comments. My point is that using a PAAS illustrates some sacrifices a customer has to make if they've traditionally been accustomed to hosting their own infrastructure. Some customers are simply not aware of expectations they might need to change. Nothing more or less than that. I'm not sure bob@heroku.com helps me here unless I was previously introduced to Bob from a notification of a general support e-mail. Again, I'm speaking without paid Heroku experience here but to me it seems the equivalent of a "Hiya guys!" greeting. Heroku is owned by Salesforce which describes itself as an "enterprise cloud computing company."
- nthj 14y ago
  sure, that tracks. I think our main difference is over whether or not the stacks are fundamentally the same. The legacy apps can still run the same Rails version, can still run the same Ruby version, and can still deploy using `git push,` it's just a more powerful abstraction. To me, this migration feels like the equivalent of "Oh hey, you've gotta upgrade your database version and download a few security patches for your OS", which any enterprise-level company is going to be more than familiar with. It's not like they came out and said "well bugger, we don't support Rails 2 anymore, you gotta rewrite all your app code to work in Rails 3." I would understand any frustration then. shrugs