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Comment by CoffeeOnWrite | Hacker News Reader

I love this article but don't understand the conclusion. Heroku is dead as a doornail, of course.

Salesforce's core product was on bare metal up to a couple years ago. What they should have done is adopt Heroku as their internal Platform-as-a-Service. That would have solved three problems: 1) provided a ready and proven foundation for cloud adoption by Salesforce business units, 2) stimulated Heroku's product roadmap by giving it a very large and loyal design partner, and 3) eliminated the opportunity cost in terms of headcount, developer productivity, and poor imitation that came with the alternative "Falcon" aka "Hyperforce" project that became Salesforce's albatross and black hole for developer energy and goodwill going on 7+ years now.

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> 2) stimulated Heroku's product roadmap by giving it a very large and loyal design partner

This is very much a double-edged sword. I've seen products get killed because they had one outsized customer with outsized influence over the product design and made it too specific to that customer rather than building something for everyone the customer would have to adapt to.

If they had, heroku would be very different today, since they aren't even doing enterprise contracts anymore (from what I saw of some other comments here). Maybe that would have been a good thing, maybe not.

> What they should have done is adopt Heroku as their internal Platform-as-a-Service

From what I saw, Heroku was unsuitable for a serious large company. Deploy-on-push is a nice UX for a small company, but once you need something more structured, it wasn't enough.

That lacks imagination. There's no corporate workflow that can't ultimately translate to moving git tags.

Perhaps, but why should one do it when it's a bad model ? Jury because it's possible ?

How did you objectively decide it's a bad model?

Because it's more enterprise to open a Service Now ticket and have Joe from IT upload the new content using FTP.

I subjectively did based on my experience.

Except you want to track what went to production and what didn't and for how long

Git is remarkably good at tracking history. CI systems are also great at showing history.

Releases of a Heroku app is tracked by the platform, and both shown the the UI, in the CLI and available in the API.

Can you elaborate on your claim it’s not enough? PasS (platform as a service) has been transformative for modern infrastructure. Containers for better, or worse, have made deployments substantially “easier,” giving every org the ability to provide Heroku like services. But, Heroku provided this sort of ease, and more, long before containers ate the world. And regardless of containers themselves, I fail to see how something “more structured” would even exist. Deploy on push is still subject to being merged and everywhere I’ve worked has had no shortage of checks and approvals to merge.

I previously deployed stuff to Salesforce when I ran a very large Asia-Pacific Salesforce org.

The previous way (prior to SFDX which was clearly influenced by Heroku) was terrible. 12 hour long deploys that end when one unit test times out-style terrible. No code history terrible. There is no way that Heroku was worse for integration.

Whether they could have replaced APEX with Heroku is a different issue.

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