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wavemode 2 hours ago [-]
What it seems like has happened, is that most or all Product Manager oversight was removed from the Heroku project, and an engineering team was given ownership of the whole thing, for the purpose of ongoing maintenance.
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.)
msteffen 10 hours ago [-]
Five bucks it’s this:
Management: “we’re going into maintenance mode”
Devs: “You mean we get to work on whatever we want?!”
hanspagel 6 hours ago [-]
100% management is gone, engineers took over
msteffen 10 hours ago [-]
Next week: “we are right-sizing the organization”
bigotiddies 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
collimarco 6 hours ago [-]
I have built Cuber (https://github.com/cuber-cloud/cuber-gem) a few years ago as a replacement for Heroku and now we use it to deploy all our Rails applications on DigitalOcean Kubernetes. Extremely lower cost, better performance, less bugs, better support...
anonzzzies 4 hours ago [-]
Is Heroku that expensive these days? What are extremely lower costs? In my experience DO is hella expensive.
cristinaibunea 4 hours ago [-]
Northflank is by far the cheapest alternative
bovermyer 5 hours ago [-]
I long ago switched to Fly.io. It feels like the old days of Heroku.
elAhmo 6 hours ago [-]
I don't understand who is still using Heroku today.
nathanappere 4 hours ago [-]
The experience of "you push, provision databases & dependencies in 3 clicks, and it just works" is sadly still unmatched.
frollogaston 34 minutes ago [-]
Yep, even in the things that tried to copy Heroku
fg137 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe true in 2010 but not today.
teeray 2 hours ago [-]
Today, you get the more streamlined experience of push, 3 clicks to restart CI & container build, push 1000 yamls, click to restart the build again, cry when it all fails.
dizhn 5 hours ago [-]
They might be dumping the last of the stuff that was already in the pipeline.
ziovercel 1 hours ago [-]
Heroku > Vercel. Try again HN
ChrisArchitect 9 hours ago [-]
The related discussion on one of the mentioned blog posts:
What a weird article that's microanalysing language in Heroku's blog posts. I mean times are such that pivot-churn is becoming business as usual for most outfits these days so I wouldn't put any stock on C-Suite verbiage.
satvikpendem 42 minutes ago [-]
It's an ad for the author's service, that's how all of these engineering blogs generally are.
dangus 9 hours ago [-]
The blog author isn’t understanding it but it’s quite simple: the product only matters in the context of large enterprise customers.
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.
sghiassy 10 hours ago [-]
Heroku has been going downhill ever since Salesforce bought them.
0xc133 9 hours ago [-]
Strong disagree. They didn’t even invent buildpacks until 2011, the year after the acquisition.
sghiassy 9 hours ago [-]
Momentum??
nextaccountic 8 hours ago [-]
If they still had momentum one year after acquisition, I think it's hard to say they have been going downhill
Maybe we could say they went uphill instead for a while? Or something
ubertaco 3 hours ago [-]
In my experience, generally Salesforce takes a little while before they notice that they bought you and start imposing uniformity and forcibly regressing you to their mean.
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.
Actually the opposite: they came into their prime after the acquisition. Probably not due to Salesforce, but still.
9dev 9 hours ago [-]
It’s just in coma, slowly dying away on a respirator. Some relatives irrationally keep paying the hospital to keep the patient alive, but the doctors just wait until they can finally pull the plugs and use the bed for someone with actual chances of survival.
cyberax 9 hours ago [-]
I think the downhill slide started when they introduced the "Private Space Peering". It is a wrapper on top of AWS VPC, but it was something like $1000 a month several years ago. It also was gating larger instances and other important features.
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.
bigotiddies 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
slowvercel 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
richwater 55 minutes ago [-]
wow, not even bothering to hide the antisemitism.
> account created 9minutes ago.
guzfip 54 minutes ago [-]
Where have you been the last year? It’s much more explicit elsewhere on social media.
elwray 8 hours ago [-]
I think its impossible for the Herokus and the digital oceans of the world to survive in the cloud world. They might be able to create better experience for customers but noone can match the networking that AWS, GCP and Azure can provide. Low latency will always win over better developer experience.
anonyfox 2 minutes ago [-]
on the other hand modern tech stacks can process insane amounts of req/s for typical websites/services in a single shared vserver core. not your 2010 ruby snoozefest anymore. plus I can't even remember when a few decade old droplets needed anything from me and still host some things just fine with zero issues or friction or nagging at all. DO is the number one pick for me in 2026 still when the problem fits a droplet style deployment, full stop.
kaoD 6 hours ago [-]
DigitalOcean is the Arduino of cloud.
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.
arnvald 7 hours ago [-]
Heroku runs on AWS though, doesn’t it? They just package it.
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
fragmede 7 hours ago [-]
Vercel is the chosen replacement, I believe.
petcat 6 hours ago [-]
Vercel is basically just an AWS reseller too though
interstice 8 hours ago [-]
I've never found cloud anything to beat the speed (and price) of a well placed server.
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.
petcat 6 hours ago [-]
> has less cores than I remember seeing at the same price a decade ago
Less cores but probably 5x more performance per core now.
interstice 4 hours ago [-]
This is more helpful when software doesn't just pin the first 4 available cores at 100% to get things done.
SpaceNugget 4 hours ago [-]
How? If each core is 5x faster then it's done 5x sooner. I can't think of a use case for a cheap vps where 5x faster per core cpus are not helpful.
interstice 3 hours ago [-]
A slower background transcode usually doesn't matter, but a faster transcode that stops important processes running in the meantime might. This is usually fixable with effort, but sometimes it's nice to not have to configure everything to the nth degree.
SpaceNugget 3 hours ago [-]
I don't really buy it. The idea that somehow getting one less core but faster per core speeds per pricing bracket makes any difference in this imagined problem.
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.
interstice 1 hours ago [-]
You don't have to buy anything, however I ran into this exact issue two days ago. YMMV
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46913903
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.
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.
> account created 9minutes ago.
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.
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
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.