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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Five bucks it’s this:
Management: “we’re going into maintenance mode”
Devs: “You mean we get to work on whatever we want?!”
100% management is gone, engineers took over
Next week: “we are right-sizing the organization”
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...
I long ago switched to Fly.io. It feels like the old days of Heroku.
I don't understand who is still using Heroku today.
Heroku has been going downhill ever since Salesforce bought them.
Strong disagree. They didn’t even invent buildpacks until 2011, the year after the acquisition.
Momentum??
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
I can't believe that it has been over 15 years ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982489
Actually the opposite: they came into their prime after the acquisition. Probably not due to Salesforce, but still.
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.
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.
The related discussion on one of the mentioned blog posts:
An update of Heroku
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46913903
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.
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.
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
Vercel is the chosen replacement, I believe.
Vercel is basically just an AWS reseller too though
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.
> has less cores than I remember seeing at the same price a decade ago
Less cores but probably 5x more performance per core now.
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.
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.