Dear Heroku: Uhh What's Going On?

https://judoscale.com/blog/heroku-whats-going-on

by crcastle • 4 months ago

108 44 4 months ago

judoscale.com

msteffen2• 4 months ago

Five bucks it’s this:

Management: “we’re going into maintenance mode”

Devs: “You mean we get to work on whatever we want?!”

msteffen2• 4 months ago

Next week: “we are right-sizing the organization”

hanspagel• 4 months ago

100% management is gone, engineers took over

sghiassy2• 4 months ago

Heroku has been going downhill ever since Salesforce bought them.

offmycloud• 4 months ago

I can't believe that it has been over 15 years ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982489

0xc133• 4 months ago

Strong disagree. They didn’t even invent buildpacks until 2011, the year after the acquisition.

sghiassy2• 4 months ago

Momentum??

9dev• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

tnolet• 4 months ago

Actually the opposite: they came into their prime after the acquisition. Probably not due to Salesforce, but still.

N_Lens• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

It's an ad for the author's service, that's how all of these engineering blogs generally are.

dangus• 4 months 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.

ChrisArchitect• 4 months ago

The related discussion on one of the mentioned blog posts:

An update of Heroku

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46913903

elwray• 4 months 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.

interstice4• 4 months 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.

petcat2• 4 months 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.

arnvald• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

Vercel is the chosen replacement, I believe.

kaoD• 4 months 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.

anonyfox• 4 months 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.

elAhmo• 4 months ago

I don't understand who is still using Heroku today.

nathanappere• 4 months ago

The experience of "you push, provision databases & dependencies in 3 clicks, and it just works" is sadly still unmatched.

fg1372• 4 months ago

Maybe true in 2010 but not today.

frollogaston• 4 months ago

Yep, even in the things that tried to copy Heroku

collimarco• 4 months 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 months ago

Is Heroku that expensive these days? What are extremely lower costs? In my experience DO is hella expensive.

cristinaibunea• 4 months ago

Northflank is by far the cheapest alternative

bovermyer• 4 months ago

I long ago switched to Fly.io. It feels like the old days of Heroku.

dizhn• 4 months ago

They might be dumping the last of the stuff that was already in the pipeline.

wavemode• 4 months 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.)

ziovercel• 4 months ago

Heroku > Vercel. Try again HN

youngtaff• 4 months ago

???

cestith• 4 months ago

I understand Judoscale is a customer with apprehensions and is asking for clarity. That will definitely raise anxiety.

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.

Dear Heroku: Uhh What's Going On?

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