An Update on Heroku
heroku.com288 points by lstoll 10 hours ago
288 points by lstoll 10 hours ago
As somebody whose first day working at Heroku was the day this acquisition closed, I think it’s mostly a misconception to blame Salesforce for Heroku’s stagnation and eventual irrelevance. Salesforce gave Heroku a ton of funding to build out a vision that was way ahead of its time. Docker didn’t even come out until 2013, AWS didn’t even have multiple regions when it was built. They mostly served as an investor and left us alone to do our thing, or so it seemed those first couple years.
The launch of the multi language Cedar runtime in 2011 led to incredible growth and by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges. Despite more than tripling our headcount in that first year (~20 to 74) we could not keep up.
Mid 2012 was especially bad as we were severely impacted by two us-east-1 outages just 2 weeks apart. To the extent it wasn’t already, reliability and paying down tech debt became the main focus and I think we went about 18 months between major user-facing platform launches (Europe region and eventually larger sized dynos being the biggest things we eventually shipped after that drought). The organization lost its ability to ship significant changes or maybe never really had that ability at scale.
That time coincided with the founders taking a step back, leaving a loss of leadership and vision that was filled by people more concerned with process than results. I left in 2014 and at that time it already seemed clear to me that the product was basically stalled.
I’m not sure how much of this could have been done better even in hindsight. In theory Salesforce could have taken a more hands on approach early on but I don’t think that could have ended better. They were so far from profitability in late 2010 that they could not stay independent without raising more funding. The venture market in ~2010 was much smaller than a few years later—tiny rounds and low valuations. Had the company spent its pre-acquisition engineering cycles building for scalability & reliability at the expense of product velocity they probably would have never gotten successful.
Even still, it was the most amazing professional experience of my career, full of brilliant and passionate people, and it’s sad to see it end this way.
It remains the greatest engineering team I've ever seen or had the pleasure to be a part of. I was only there from early 2011 to mid 2012 but what I took with me changed me as an engineer. The shear brilliance of the ideas and approaches...I was blessed to witness it. I don't think I can overstate it, though many will think this is all hyperbole. I didn't always agree with the decisions made and I was definitely there when the product stagnation started, but we worked hard to reduce tech debt, build better infrastructure, and improve... but man, the battles we fought. Many fond memories, including the single greatest engineering mistake I've ever seen made, one that I still think about until this day (but will never post in a public forum :)).
It was a pleasure working with you bgentry!
Thanks for sharing your story. Those early days of using Heroku were really enjoyable for me. It felt so promising and simple. I remember explaining the concept to a lot of different people who didn't believe that the deployment model could be that simple and accessible until I showed them.
Then life went on, I bounced around in my career, and forgot about Heroku. Years later I actually suggested it for someone to use for a simple project once and I could practically feel the other developers in the room losing respect for me for even mentioning it. I hadn't looked at it for so long that I didn't realize it had fallen out of favor.
> That time coincided with the founders taking a step back, leaving a loss of leadership and vision that was filled by people more concerned with process than results
This feels all too familiar. All of my enjoyable startup experiences have ended this way: The fast growing, successful startup starts attracting people who look like they should be valuable assets to the company, but they're more interested in things like policies, processes, meetings, and making the status reports look nice than actually shipping and building.
Thanks for a capsule tour through Heroku!
FWIW, the team that eventually created "Docker" was working at the same time on dotCloud as a direct Heroku competitor. I remember meeting them at a meet-up in the old Twitter building but couldn't tell you exactly which year that was. Maybe 2010 or 2011?
Yep, that team did great work. I remember having lunch at the Heroku office with the dotCloud team in 2011 or 2012 and also Solomon Hykes demoing Docker to us in our office’s basement before it launched. So much cool stuff was happening back then!
I remember Solomon's demoing at All Hands... it was such a crazy time for tech and innovation.
"We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers."
Proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.
I worked at Pardot around the time Salesforce started using this same language in internal announcements about Pardot.
Our Pardot leadership translated for us and provided the necessary context: Pardot is being killed. The plan was to start building the product that would replace it, stop selling new contracts, rename Pardot in the meantime so the change wouldn't be as noticeable, and in a timeline of "by 10 years from now" Pardot wouldn't exist anymore.
This is Salesforce for "last call for the lifeboats, we're gonna capsize the boat."
If any Heroku customer is reading this and not immediately going "we need to move off Heroku ASAP" all future problems are their own fault.
That has been the case for a very long time at this point, the Salesforce acquisition was a death knell. The only stuff i have left on Heroku are zombie projects I don't care about.
The Salesforce acquisition closed in 2010, when Heroku was barely three years old.
A whole lot of Heroku's best features shipped after they were acquired. They had a pretty good run under Salesforce for the first few years.
It would be interesting to hear a full oral history of when and where things went wrong after that. I expect the original founders leaving was a major factor.
Was clear to me. If I was looking at using them, I wouldn’t. If I was already using them, I’d stop. They seem dedicated to supporting the slow extinction so it doesn’t have to be a fire drill exit, but how do you sleep at night knowing they’re playing with matches.
What's not to get? The product is being bumped down in terms of priority so they can focus on AI word salad solutions. They are waiting for enough customers to end their contracts before they discontinue the product altogether.
As a former enterprise person, this clearly states “exiting growth cycle into low-staffing maintenance mode”; Salesforce must have bought them to kill a price-beating competitor to multi-year Salesforce PaaS contracts, same as Okta did with Auth0. Investors are typically-majority short-sighted and only care about growth-cycle revenue, so once they reached market saturation, they were ripe and duly reaped. So long, Heroku.
You are saying the plan was to buy a "price-beating competitor", invest in them for 16 years, and then finally pull the rug out now?
They’re not competition if you own them! Typepad continued for over a decade after it was purchased. Auth0 is still in maintenance mode afaik. It can last as long as revenue pays for the FTE to maintain it, or until corporate reallocated the FTE to higher revenue-per-FTE-hour opportunities.
Auth0 still has a ton of people working on it at Okta. If they’re facing execution problems, it’s not due to a lack of resources.
Reminds me of https://youtu.be/T2BY8zZ1CTM?si=XDroWqVD-pElN9si
FYI, you forgot to remove the &si= tracking cookie from your derogatory comment that uniquely identifies you. As a former Salesforce/Heroku employee and so presumably familiar with Heroku’s treatment within the megacorp for at least some of (checks notes) the past sixteen years, do you have anything relevant to contribute to this post?
Absolutely none of this is true. What was the PaaS Heroku was apparently beating at the time of the acquisition?
"sustaining engineering model"
ie, life support.. bit rot will set in, they are dead.
It means: go elsewhere, they're dead.
What's the best alternative?
We saw this coming (like most people) a while ago when Heroku started flaking without status updates, and moved part of our workload to Fly. We ended up moving off Fly as well (significant unreliability and just some very strange network load balancer issues that would cause us downtime) and went to Railway, and that's been fantastic so far. We've moved our whole workload onto it.
If you like VPS, Hetzner with Dokploy. It works great, the UI has essentially all the features of Fly or Render that you'd use for deployment, like preview build URLs and environments.
Very close to the worst alternative for people who actually need Heroku, but it won't stop people from plugging it to death and back.
Eh, no, depends on why you used Heroku in the first place. Way back when, I used it because the UI was dead simple and it Just Worked™. If I can replicate that with a VPS and have a good UI around it that takes care of everything, it's functionally the same to me.
"Depends on what you used it for" applies to just about any platform.
Realistically, self-hosting the PaaS defeats the purpose of a PaaS for the crowd Heroku was attracting.
Heroku was one of the first to have that seamless UX, only after which others like Fly or Render or Railway came to copy it. I wager people were primarily attracted to that user experience and only minimally cared that it was fully hosted versus not, because there was also AWS at that time.