Heroku Sunsets the Aspen Stack | Hacker News Reader

Heroku Sunsets the Aspen Stack

blog.heroku.com

19 pointsthinkbohemian17 comments

Two thoughts:

1) Interesting that they're not bothering to notify unpaid users of the aspen stack. Side benefit of this, I guess, is that they can shed some of the unused, unpaid apps they've accumulated.

2) In light of 1, It'd be nice if there was an easy way to find out if I have any aspen apps. I had to go to the settings page for each of my apps to find out I'm using Bamboo and Cedar across the board.

curl -sn https://api.heroku.com/apps | ruby -r json -e 'JSON.parse(STDIN.read).select{|app| app["stack"] =~ /aspen/}.each{|app| puts app["name"]}'

Those paying for Aspen were notified by a personal email from me along with direct lines for support. We've been increasing our deprecation measures on the platform and we are ramping up communication to all application owners. This blog post is one of those steps.

All unpaid apps are put to sleep when not in use to save us costs and to allow us to continue to off a free tier. (you can get rid of this sleep functionality by adding an extra dyno). Getting rid of in-active apps really doesn't buy us mutch, maybe a few megabytes of hard-drive space.

We are interested in all developers having a quality experience on Heroku and this includes the migrating experience. We differentiate between "production" and "development" quality applications in a number of areas such as https://status.heroku.com. We consider a production application to have at least 2 dynos, and a non-shared database. At the end of the day we are not a free service. We will go above and beyond when possible by offering personal support to those who need and value it the most.

I would like to add that the number of users of Aspen is incredibly small. If you don't know already, you probably don't have one.

For (2), Type `aspen` in the search bar of Heroku Dashboard.

From the posting, "On Thursday, November 22nd, all applications that have not requested an extension will no longer be functional. Owners of paid Aspen apps have been individually contacted about this change. We provided migration instructions, a contact for requesting an extension, and many of them have already migrated their apps."

For those of you who were paying for services on Aspen, when did you receive your notification?

I sent out notifications from my personal account on August 22nd. It took a bit longer to get the blog post out due to some internal events. So far the response has been positive. Many people who responded were no longer using their applications or had forgotten about them. It is hard to under-state just how few people were still using this stack.

Why do you ask?

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?

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 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-dep...

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.

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.]

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."

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

Pro tip: if, like me, you have an ancient app on Aspen and moving it to Cedar sounds like a horrible, horrible transition, just switch it to Bamboo instead. Buys you some more time to put it off until they sunset that too.

Btw, Cedar now supports Ruby 1.8.7 if that helps.

Yes. Cedar with 1.8.7 is a much saner option. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/ruby-versions

And also guarantees that you'll have to come back and deal with it again in the future.

But it'll also give me a longer deadline than a couple months (which is important when it's a side project that I don't want to dedicate a lot of time to).

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