Dear Heroku: Uhh What's Going On?
judoscale.com
judoscale.com
But, paradoxically, this has given those engineers free rein to make whatever improvements they deem fit - including things they may have been blocked from working on in the past due to Product meddling and/or corporate bureaucracy.
(Not speaking authoritatively - this situation just, from the outside, appears to have a lot of parallels to teams I've been on that owned "Legacy" services.)
Management: “we’re going into maintenance mode”
Devs: “You mean we get to work on whatever we want?!”
An update of Heroku
The large customers still get what they want as long as the ask isn’t too big and that’s why you see new features even though the product is in maintenance mode.
However, Heroku said they were changing focus. It’s entirely possible to change focus away from something and still do some of it. A focus on things other than new features doesn’t mean, necessarily, no new features at all. Heroku could probably save their customers and partners a lot of anxiety by being clearer and more explicit what they mean.
Maybe we could say they went uphill instead for a while? Or something
This was a(n internally-)famously hard and lengthy process for them with ExactTarget (read: Marketing Cloud) because ExactTarget employees identified strongly with "ExactTarget orange" culture rather than "Salesforce blue", which mostly meant being appalled at the technical and process swamp that Salesforce represented and pushing hard to keep their own tech stack and their own culture and standards as long as possible.
Heroku had an interesting arc, as they were the bright spot people would point at internally as where actually good engineering somehow happene even at Salesforce. There was a whole effort to let Heroku be the business unit that paved the path to AWS and PaaS for the entire company (which was at the time operating datacenters themselves), and so Heroku got a bunch of investment and freedom for a bit.
Then there was some weird power struggle, and the executives inexplicably decided not only to take that out of Heroku's hands despite their expertise, but also to basically shove Heroku in a corner to be ignored unless stripmined of its customer base through upsells or its staff through reallocations of headcount.
So few people used it. I guess this provided a negative signal to their management about the adoption rate of new features. And then everything eventually just died.
DO has always been a bit rich for my blood though, and even a low cost hetzner VPS has less cores than I remember seeing at the same price a decade ago. I could be wrong there though I usually use Vultr for their SYD region.
Less cores but probably 5x more performance per core now.
There are many different configurations of vps available with different numbers of cores, if you are picking the vps configuration specifically to have more cores than some transcoding software uses by default to avoid configuring a thread limit for that software then you are still configuring things to the nth degree just at the objectively wrong level of abstraction.
I don’t think it’s impossible for them to survive. Salesforce bought them more than 10 years ago and did little to support growth of Heroku. And yet they’re still around and people still ask „is there something new with comparable customer experience?” because they don’t mind paying more
True, it can't compete with AWS/GCP/Azure if you're large scale. But most of us are not large scale, we just need a no frills experience instead of dealing with 27 nested panels just to spin up a VM.