They're working on something called "Project Periwinkle" that is intended to remove all Heroku branding and make everything Salesforce branded. Periwinkle being a colour between blue (salesforce) and purple (heroku). No more Heroku signups, you'll need a Salesforce account to use it. No more free tier either.
Heroku has been in the process of being sunset for years now. New features have been banned for years. Only "keep the lights on" projects are allowed. Not that they could do anything with the skeleton crew they have running the platform.
Bob Wise's LinkedIn doesn't even mention Heroku, only Salesforce. Lenora mentions the project here: https://www.lenoraporter.com/portfolio/salesforce
Source: I'm a former employee that left in protest because of this project.
It is difficult for me to understand why Salesforce is not aware of the strength of the Heroku brand among experienced technology workers, and how much they have destroyed that brand in the last 2-3 years.
This project Periwinkle sounds awful. Basically thats the end of using Heroku for us. If it remains like this its something to judge from.
It's worth mentioning that this isn't a result of Salesforce acquiring Heroku. That happened 12 years ago when Heroku was next to nothing. Salesforce gets credit for investing in and making Heroku. Why they ultimately have decided to give up on it I have no idea. I hear it's because salespeople had a hard time understanding how to sell it which seems like a strange reason to give up entirely.
That's sad, I guess.
Everyone thought they were the darling child, at least for the first 18 months.
Yet unfortunately from my experience with large orgs and sales, the sales people get all the control and freely shit on the people actually making the software they sell.
So you had an idea after all?
Eventually they'll get there, but customers should know that's the direction. They'll be users of "Compute Cloud" writing APEX instead of Procfiles someday.
Guess I'm packing it up as I'm no longer seen as target audience (its my hobby project platform)
> New features have been banned for years. Only "keep the lights on" projects are allowed.
What???
That's what it's looked like from the outside -- that no features were for whatever reason(s) no longer going to happen. But still dismaying to hear it from the inside in those terms.
I think the feature freeze happened in 2018
I don't know what's going on exactly. Those who set up heroku for the first ~5 years somehow did such a good job that they could coast for another 5-10 and still stay on top of what they were on top of.
[1] - https://render.com/
[2] - https://fly.io/
[3] - https://porter.run/
I next looked at fly.io, which seem ok for the first two apps, assuming they use the same database. If I ever want more than two apps, it seems I will need to start hosting different apps together, which is the opposite of the headache-free experience I'm looking for.
Porter runs on my own cloud account, so I can't trust it to not cost too much.
Maybe I can get a Kubernetes cluster somewhere (DigitalOcean?) and deploy all my small apps to it, but it sounds like a headache.
I'm staying with heroku.
I have paid apps and free apps (staticman comment processing, and very simple apps I create while following learning tutorials). This project sounds bad! I’ve been slowly exploring alternatives, and was about to abandon my search due to demands on my time. Guess I need to keep exploring.
interestingly, when i log in or reauthenticate, or log in through the heroku cli, I get sent to https://verify.salesforce.com/v1/verify/
I did try a heroku competitor recently and my builds failed. And there was no detailed log to show why. So I couldn’t troubleshoot it and I immediately gave up!
As an aside, I was really hoping this post was going to be “we read that one competitor’s blog post last week clearly detailing all the areas where we can improve, and we HEAR you.”
Well, those, and:
1. Speed. It took days for heroku customers to be told about this.
2. Customers sign up at "heroku.com", the platform is called "Heroku", the CLI is "heroku", everything's heroku, so don't send emails from a parent company (Salesforce), send them from "Heroku".
3. Unambiguous info on what customers need to do. I had to guess based on HN comments whether config vars were accessed. Config vars are 100x more sensitive than code. Comms should be unambiguous and complete, and if incomplete for any reason, explain that (e.g. we don't know yet).
4. I still don't know whether having 1 Github Deploy on my Heroku account allowed unauthorized access to all heroku applications on my heroku account (i.e. those using other deploy methods, like `git push heroku main`). Were all my apps' repositories able to be accessed, or just the one(s) deployed via Github Deploys?
5. I still don't know whether unauthorized access was gained to all other GitHub respositories on my GitHub account, i.e. the repos that aren't heroku apps.
These said, I still really appreciate that security incidents happen and aren't easy to deal with, and there's no obligation for anyone at a profitable company to actually care about semi-captive customers, so thanks to Heroku for the efforts; it's genuinely appreciated.