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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* The industry – suffering because Heroku holds market share that should go to competitors capable of innovating.
* Customers – suffering because their platform will die but their vendor isn't being transparent about that fact.
* Herokai – suffering because they could be doing something better with their careers, even if it is on another sfdc product.
Make sunset plans now and let customers know what the timeline will look like. "Trust is the #1 value" at sfdc, right?
As someone who said "I'm sure it can't get any worse" with heroku for many years and was proven wrong over and over, I genuinely don't know what you mean by this. Lots of stuff just doesn't work. Updated buildpacks don't get released on a useful timescale ("just make your own" isn't an answer). The platform is plagued by bizarre performance issues and noisy neighbors, and the pricing doesn't support it. In my time on Heroku, I couldn't break three nines of uptime one year entirely because of platform issues, including one incident where the DNS provider Heroku uses just stopped working in Israel (which Heroku gaslit me about for over a week). I don't know what "operating at scale" means to you, but if the service is consistently bad compared to the competition, it doesn't matter what scale they operate at. It's a meaningless metric.
Pretty sure none of these can run any JVM applications. Heroku can, very easily.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, there are definitely details Heroku didn't have; for example, we only had something like the past 500 (or was it 100?) lines from a customer's logs; you would need to have an add-on to retain them.
There were no internal logs to consult about app performance; the New Relic install requests were probably to see if there is an issue related to the app. If the issue went deeper, we would work with the engineering team for the feature in question; but with the volume of tickets, we would have to categorically rule out an app issue first as 99% of issues happened while I was there. I think it is fair to say Heroku's support tried to embrace the "teach a man to fish" strategy, and that wouldn't work if the problem wasn't with the app.
I can't really speak to the billing issues, but that team was tiny; two or three people. I could definitely see them getting overwhelmed, and I heard about the lack of detailed billing support.
(Out of curiousity, were you using Heroku's docker product? I could definitely see that as having caused the sort of problems you mention as Heroku's docker platform was not vanilla docker.)
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.)
What CIO/CTO is going to bet everything on some magic high level platform?