Heroku Class Action
herokuclassaction.com
herokuclassaction.com
Like Rapleaf, we have spent an enormous amount of effort optimizing and searching for the causes of latency, and overpay for dynos to reduce but not eliminate the chance of latency issues. Heroku has always told us it's our fault.
While I have no interest in recovering money through a class action lawsuit - which is just grossly unproductive - my confidence in heroku has been shattered and I am embarrassed to have chosen and advocated for them for so long. I look forward to getting off their platform for good, and there is no way I could recommend it to others for similar applications.
Heroku's most recent statement does nothing to resolve the issue for most of their customers, and does not reduce what is clearly a gross overpricing and misrepresentation of what they provide.
It's quite clear that Heroku is not just a bad, but a horrible choice for rails applications that are not carefully designed for concurrency and don't go against Heroku recommendations and use a concurrent application server.
I hear people say this a lot but I believe it comes more from the emotion of fear than a rational consideration of the possibilities. For example, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk now supports Rails deployments that are just as easy as Heroku, and you retain 100% control over the underlying EC2/ELB/etc resources while having a nice management layer to help you out.
Regardless, it's a significant amount of work for a startup with just a few engineers, perhaps a week of two of distraction. I expect a bunch of "how to migrate off of heroku" blog posts will be out there shortly.
FYI you can keep all your Heroku addons inside your Heroku account while utilizing them from a server outside Heroku. For example, if you use the "Redis To Go" Heroku addon, you can fire up your own EC2 instance (possibly through AWS Elastic Beanstalk) and connect to your Redis To Go instance using the same connection info. The main difference will be that you won't have access to Heroku's environment variables that you're using now, but you can use a config file instead.
I note that there are zero words devoted to what fraction of the money will leave the coffers of the lawyers and actually make it to the customers.
Whenever I choose service providers (or choose to outsource services) my first thought is "what happens if I have to switch away from them?" Even if you think my first rule of business is too cynical, everyone has problems, and if you are locked into a provider while they are having problems, well, you have a problem.
I mean, PAAS seems like a great idea for people who want to write apps but not be sysadmins. But personally? I don't understand why anyone would sign up with a PAAS provider that was unique. I mean, if you have to re-write your app to change providers, you are locked in, in a terrifying way.
We chose heroku and Rails for the reasons you suggest, and even tried to avoid major tie-ins to the platform. That doesn't mean it's trivial to move to another platform.
I don't see how this is true.
There is nothing about PaaS that says there can't be compatible competitors. Hell, there have been PHP shared hosting platforms that were very nearly identical between providers for a decade before anyone started saying PaaS, and really, the "Innovation" that made shared hosting PaaS lies in per-usage billing.
Full disclosure: I work for AppFog, one of the providers listed.
You mean Rap Genius?
You may well find that running your own ops means you run into exactly the same sort of issues - most companies see multiple major problems with their infrastructure as they scale. Heroku certainly haven't delivered for everyone, and it seems their promises of painless scaling are just not being met when it comes to larger customers, but this stuff is hard, and moving off heroku won't get rid of these problems for you, but it will make them your problems and perhaps give you more of a chance to fix them.
It would be really interesting (for heroku customers and for everyone else) to see a write up of your transition when you do move - it may not be as painful to do so as you anticipate.
Kudos on not recommending a lawsuit, which I can't see helping anyone but lawyers at this point.
I hope RapGenius is not the lead plaintiff in this, otherwise I will be very disappointed.
I applaud them for raising this issue, and doing all the research they did. We are all much better off for it.
I applaud them for sticking to their guns to make sure Heroku fixes the issue.
But if they join this class action suit, in my humble opinion, it is one step too far. What is the max they can realistically expect to get back from Heroku? $250K? $500K? Surely not the entire $20K/mo, so I doubt it will be that much.
Given all the money they have raised so far, if I were one of their investors I would start to ask questions about if they are wasting their time frivolously beating a dead horse.
This is getting into 'bad karma' territory. I am sure someone, at some point, will want to sue RapGenius....they may remember how they behave now.
So yes, keep up the pressure, and keep forcing Heroku to fix their faulty systems.
But a class action suit dawg? I think not.
This negatively affected a lot of their customers in many ways (overspending on heroku, time wasted, lost customers and revenue).
When Heroku's customers have incurred significant costs and/or losses because of Heroku's false claims, I don't see why this is so inappropriate. We need to make companies accountable for their claims.
For context, I am a Heroku customer and have been significantly affected by all of this. I won't participate in the lawsuit but I can understand why others would.
As a long time Heroku user, I was pissed when I heard this...but they have done so much good for my own development career and freelance gigs, that this is easily forgiveable with a slap on the wrist and a partial refund to customers that have paid a lot over the years.
More than likely, they just never realized how big of a deal it was - because they were busy expanding. A few customers (few being relative to their total support requests) probably did inquire and some manager probably developed the response that they are aware of the problem, but not dealing with it right now.
It's not as if they built the company on the premise that they are going to say 1 thing and do something else.
This is just something that fell through the cracks as they grew.
Let's not blow it out of proportion.
EDIT: comma placement.
This is the right thing to do. Heroku made their bed and now they must lie in it.
They have the resources to handle the suit and fix the "damn problems" at the same time.
Regardless, the point has been made. They need to compensate those customers - but this lawsuit is frivolous, opportunistic and going too far.
I think Heroku has done a tremendous amount of good, especially in the Ruby community. This needs to be considered with the bad.
Nice template for an emotional appeal you've got there, dawg (seriously, wtf are you going for with the vernacular embellishments)
Your argument justifies malfeasance without penalty for any entity. Swap out 'Heroku' for Monsanto, Microsoft, or banks that launder money for drug cartels and read it again. See if you still buy the reasoning. If misleading and lying to customers (your words) isn't enough for a lawsuit, what is?
(Not saying Heroku is equivalent to any of the above companies, just illustrating the lack of reason in parent post).
If this is so, Heroku has a problem on its hands: its behaviour is such that it has alienated current customers and, more importantly, dissuaded potential future customers from employing the platform.
Heroku's challenges seem threefold:
One, they need to get their infrastructure in line with their branding, or vice versa.
Two, they need to assuage the doubts of current customers and offer them convincing reasons to stay.
Three, their image and reputation have taken a nosedive. I can't see well-informed potential customers considering Heroku without taking this saga into consideration. This would appear to be the most difficult, and the most important, challenge to solve. Heroku needs image rehabilitation in a big way. The only way I can see them achieving that goal is through increased honesty and engagement with their potential customer base. Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything from them that suggests they're adopting that strategy.
What is it even trying to accomplish? As far as I can tell it's essentially an ad for that law firm.
New Relic's plugin was pretty quickly updated to include the missing time after the rapgenius article came out. But that doesn't excuse Heroku from lying about what they were selling and so far they've done nothing to make amends for those lies.
The Cedar stack (which Heroku has been encouraging people to use for a long while now) has always claimed to do random routing.
This is only part of the whole story as well.
Edit: To be clear, I do not support this legal action. I do want Heroku to hear the community, but I don't want it to go this far.
So what you suggest would be great, but unfortunately not possible.
Wmf: "Build another building, geeez!"
Inequitable money distribution aside, I think the bad press Heroku has received over this is probably enough punishment. I don't support how they handled this situation but the core problem isn't exactly that bad in the first place. Nobody died here, some companies simply had slow websites and to some degree that's their own fault, they should have done their own external monitoring if that sort of critical performance was that vital to them.
Edit: s/defendant/plaintiff/
http://herokuclassaction.com/how-to-make-heroku-comply-with-...
That dig makes it personal.
Even if Heroku had handled the PR issue perfectly, it's very likely some enterprising lawyer would still be looking to sue.
Lies happen all the time, i saw someone here mention that Heroku didn't knew it was such a big deal.
They are expanding a lot, the issue (intelligent routing) has been raised and will be solved. They know what they've done wrong now... They didn't see it as a big issue before.
It's up to Heroku to resolve the problem, because at the end of the day it's an issue to be fixed.
And don't we see issues all the time in software development.
As long as the company itselves communicate about the problem and is honest about it when the problem comes up.
That's the only thing i would really care.
PS. I'm not associated (employed or client) by Heroku.
I would guess that I am a typical customer who does not really need fast scalability. I host several web apps with a modest number of users and what I care most about is reliability and then cost.
Not hard to see what's coming.