[HN Gopher] Why Did Heroku Fail?
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Why Did Heroku Fail?
Author : rckrd
Score : 25 points
Date : 2022-05-13 21:22 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matt-rickard.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (matt-rickard.com)
| jmull wrote:
| Heroku failed?
| nberkman wrote:
| > If Heroku and Engine Yard were too early, we would have seen
| more widespread adoption of next-generation PaaS (e.g., fly.io,
| Render).
|
| Seems premature to assess adoption of fly.io when it's barely
| gotten off the ground.
| monus21 wrote:
| A compelling successor to both Heroku and App Engine is Google
| Cloud Run. Dead simple to setup, no frills and cheap to run.
| simplehuman wrote:
| It didn't?
| craigkerstiens wrote:
| As someone that put a good portion of their working career into
| helping create Heroku alongside many others, several who
| contributed way more and had a larger impact, the notion that it
| failed is probably the first thing that should be up for debate.
| But because we seem to want to debate this on a weekly basis...
|
| Heroku made reproducible builds and deployments a thing at a time
| people were used to ssh'ing in and scp'ing files around for
| deployment. While 12factor later become canonized it was built
| into Heroku since day 1. Heroku was created because you could
| spend a month building a MVP app in Rails, but then it'd take as
| long to deploy it as to build it. Deploying software was too
| hard. And today we're still trying to get back to that, sometimes
| very unsuccessfully by adding abstraction layer on top of
| abstraction layer. Did Heroku fail? We're still talking about it
| over 10 years since being acquired as a gold standard for
| developer experience.
|
| Okay, fine, but it wasn't acquired for something like GitHub...
| While two very different companies Heroku was acquired nearly 10
| years earlier. It was the first large scale acquisition out of
| YC. I do not know the internals of YC, but it's been commented by
| others that know it better the exit of Heroku helped greatly YC
| for the time and place it was. It was a different time. Heroku to
| this day generates revenue and likely it's different from what
| people expect.
|
| Yeah this one is selfish, but you can largely thank Heroku for
| Amazon RDS. Way back in the day we had Rails devs asking for a
| database. We thought how hard could this be, it turns out it was
| much more work than we expected. We bet on Postgres because one
| of our engineers said it had a great track record of security and
| reliability (not playing fast and loose with data semantics)-it
| was the right choice. Years later when Amazon adding support for
| Postgres on RDS the team sent some personal notes that
| essentially said, this is because you made it so in demand.
|
| Now... what went wrong.
|
| Yes, several people left after the acquisition, some at 2-3
| years, some at 4-5 years, some are still there and have been
| before the acquisition. Acquisition or not when some of the
| technical and product visionaries leave it's hard to replace
| that. Adam gave his absolute all, he was spent after. 12factor
| felt like his going away letter. But that void was never fully
| filled, some of us may have had a shot of it, but after long runs
| were also tired.
|
| Was Heroku cocky at times toward Salesforce integration, at times
| yes. At times I don't think was always the case. Did we want to
| run 20GB J2EE apps when Rails/Django/Node were lighter-weight, of
| course not. Did we want to login to gus to open a support ticket
| on a VPN? No. Did we want to move into the SDFC offices that were
| cube farms vs. large ceilings with a lot of natural lighting?No.
| But could Salesforce help us make Heroku more available to
| customers and accelerate adoption? Sure. Could we have focused
| more on enterprise requirements around security and compliance to
| reach the enterprise audience? Yep. In retrospect maybe we should
| have proactively integrated a bit more, I know many of us there
| at that time feel that way, but there were pockets of
| integration. I recall hosting the Sayonara team at the Heroku
| office for a Friday happy hour. We made sure to have it well
| catered and make them feel as welcome as possible. There was good
| and bad in the integration, but a common metric of acquisition
| metrics is how many that are employed at time of acquisition are
| employed x years later. Heroku had a lot of us still there, 2, 3,
| 4, 5 and even beyond.
|
| Was pricing and business model a factor? Maybe. But I'm not sure
| you can get what Heroku gives you out of a single employee. I'm
| excited for what others are building in this space now, but it's
| not about being a "cheaper" Heroku it's about creating some
| advancements about easier networking, packaging what defines as
| an app as multiple services, signed/secure builds.
| bko wrote:
| I read the article but I'm still confused by the premise. What
| does it mean that Heroku failed? They're still around although
| owned by Salesforce. Are there are metrics that they're not
| making money or have no/negative growth? What am I missing?
| bogwog wrote:
| The article also says that OpenShift failed, even though it is
| also still around and (presumably) making money.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The all in one app platform model just doesn't work for
| everything.
|
| What CIO/CTO is going to bet everything on some magic high
| level platform?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| They have not pushed out any notable updates in a long time,
| bugs have remained unfixed for many years, customer support is
| unhelpful. All of the most talented engineers at Heroku left,
| the team now functions as an internal infra team for
| Salesforce. It's a zombie of a company.
|
| The product and pricing are pretty good for small projects, but
| almost everyone outgrows Heroku well before they transition
| from "small" to "medium". The pricing model hasn't changed in
| many years. Dyno sizing hasn't changed or improved pretty much
| ever. Now that compelling alternatives to Heroku exist (Render,
| fly, even Netlify) there's no good reason to launch a new
| project on Heroku. Hell, even Elastic Beanstalk manages to give
| a decent experience for many folks compared to Heroku.
| throwawaysfdc wrote:
| > the team now functions as an internal infra team for
| Salesforce
|
| This is definitely false. Though some internal apps are
| deployed on Heroku, it is not the primary deployment target
| for new projects. Heroku staff work on Heroku. Salesforce has
| a large internal infra program and team that has no overlap
| with Heroku. past codename projects have been proposed to
| change this, but none have ever come to be.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Even if the parent comment is wrong, there must be a public
| relations problem if so many people believe the product to
| be abandoned.
| throwaway427 wrote:
| Since you seem to have some insight into this, I
| interviewed a former Heroku eng a while back and he said
| that they deploy Heroku infra on Heroku, essentially
| dogfooding their own product. I also see a lot of claims
| that Heroku has essentially stagnated on features. I'm
| curious how do internal teams deal with this (do they just
| work around the stagnation?) and is there a layer that is a
| choke point for product improvement that also affects to
| internal teams (if so that would seem demoralizing)?
| 2c2c2c wrote:
| i started at a company as engineer #1 and my first task was to
| take an outsourced MVP built on heroku, port it from ruby to
| python, and make it work on aws.
|
| there was seemingly no logical reason to do any of this-- the
| product was at an early stage with nearly no traffic. even if the
| product were to become immensely successful, the traffic would
| probably never require more than a single box.
|
| but none of this seemed to matter. nor did the considerable
| amount of time making things just work. the ceo, who was at one
| point a technical engineer mind you, just wanted to be able to
| say his stuff ran on aws
|
| situations like this are probably more common than you would
| think. it's purely a brand recognition thing for them
| aquaticsunset wrote:
| The implication here is that Heroku is a standalone company with
| its full efforts being put toward the product.
|
| The article should, in my opinion, focus on why Salesforce
| allowed Heroku to stagnate and grow uncompetitive.
|
| [Disclaimer: Salesforce employee, thoughts and opinions are my
| own]
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Exactly this.
| njudah wrote:
| - Heroku generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year in
| revenue. There are plenty of interesting things to debate about
| its past and future, but it was not a failure by any reasonable
| definition.
|
| - Salesforce did ~27b in revenue in 2022; its very hard for a
| comparatively small business to get resources / mindshare in
| that environment, especially when you focus on a market /
| audience that is different than the rest of the business. From
| a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not
| particularly focused on integrated acquired products - its
| interested in selling them largely as is to existing customers.
| Fundamentally its a financial engineering and sales exercise,
| not a product innovation one. (Not to say I support or think
| thats the best way of driving growth, but offering my POV on
| the structural dynamics.)
| tschellenbach wrote:
| I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the
| acquisition
| tpmx wrote:
| Salesforce also owns Slack... Is this a preview of what will
| happen to it?
| [deleted]
| stormbrew wrote:
| It's a preview of all big fish:small fish acquisitions really.
| There are some notable exceptions, but for the most part you
| should assume that an acquisition of a product you use will
| eventually mean you'll need to go elsewhere imo.
| rhizome wrote:
| Acquisitions always ruin the thing being acquired.
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