Heroku

“Heroku very much shaped how we think of "cloud applications", autoscaling, and containerization.”

“the benefits of Heroku were precisely that it didn't need you to think about the guts of a system like Kubernetes”

“Salesforce actively invested in it and turned it into the powerhouse that people remember today.”

“From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku.”

“I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground.”

“I used to just throw everything up on a PaaS. Heroku/Render, etc. and pay way more than I needed to”

“you push, provision databases & dependencies in 3 clicks, and it just works”

“That magic sauce is Devs don't have to think about container builds/finding a container registry and creating a Dockerfile.”

“Heroku provided this sort of ease, and more, long before containers ate the world.”

“It was super annoying how delightful Heroku was, but how annoyingly locked-in and expensive it is.”

“The simpler the interface for the user, the more decisions you can make behind the scenes.”

“The shear number of engineering practices we take for granted today because of something like Heroku boggles my mind.”

“As a result, you ended up paying for dynos you weren't even using because they were now rounding up”

“The fact that it required nothing but 'git push heroku master' at the time was incredible”

“Heroku's orchestration of removing old dynos, adding new dynos, and their network control was spectacular.”

“They set the bar on how streamlined application deployment can be and a great UI to go along with it.”

“That's literally the UX I'm talking about and that's what other companies copied too”

“Heroku didn’t stay competitive price-wise with alternatives. And scaling even slightly from the basic dynos quadrupled (or whatever) the price.”

“there still really isn't in my mind a comparable offering to heroku's git push and go straight to a reasonable production”

“enjoying using the free tier of Heroku for my school projects but also the pain of dyno cold starts”

“It remains the greatest engineering team I've ever seen or had the pleasure to be a part of.”

“they had an amazing developer experience… and gave everyone free compute and data transfer”

“Salesforce gradually shifted away from a dev-first platform toward click-based config and heavy reliance on middleware for all kind of integrations.”

“it wasn’t super reliable as heroku but they’re getting better at keeping the instances up”

“I left in 2014 and at that time it already seemed clear to me that the product was basically stalled.”

“The product is being bumped down in terms of priority so they can focus on AI word salad solutions.”

“The original Heroku often gets praised here. Rightfully so. It inspired many.”

“Heroku has been running in this mode for a long time. The only difference is they made it official.”

“Acquisitions by big companies tend to slow the development to a crawl as development bureaucracy takes over.”

“A common scenario when a mega corp acquires an incredibly successful startup and then lets it die.”

“Heroku pioneered what a PaaS could be, alongside Cloud Foundry and others”

“Nothing that I know of has come close to the ease of the "Deploy to Heroku" button.”

“their Git Push Deployment was really a killer concept and a huge gateway for people just writing good apps”

“Heroku had its time but then stagnated heavily in keeping up with what was going on around it.”

“found out Heroku (notoriously known for being stuck in 2010) performed better then some more recent competitor.”

“PaaS platforms (Heroku, Render, Railway) can legitimately be operated by your average dev and not have to hire a dedicated person; those cost even more though.”

“when you just want your app to work forever without having to think about it”

“Higher-level services like PaaS (Heroku and above) genuinely do abstract a number of details”

“using easier solutions for compute or some of the more complex AWS services”

“the pricing is bonkers, and the vendor lock in makes it really hard to deal with annual price increases”