I work for a non-Heroku tech vendor, and I have always spoken highly of Heroku to my customers from my past experience of going all-in on Heroku, and receiving a top quality of support from Heroku back in 2017-2019. I'm going to point folks to the recent Hacker News threads now.

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.

The amount of Salesforce fluff in the post is quite palpable. There is a clear lack of control with the leaders in Heroku judging off this post because of the salesforce transition.

This project Periwinkle sounds awful. Basically thats the end of using Heroku for us. If it remains like this its something to judge from.

There really aren't any Heroku leaders anymore. I think anyone director level or higher is Salesforce—not Heroku.

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.

Salesforce is where good software goes to die (or at best become stagnant and lame). Same thing happened to quip and will happen to slack.

Oh no! I hope Slack doesn’t become slow and bloated, or go through unnecessary UX redesigns. /s

MS teams is proof slack could get a lot worse yet :-)

Oh man, I somehow missed Slack had been acquired by Salesforce. So many things make sense now!

I didn't know Slack had been acquired by Salesforce.

That's sad, I guess.

This happens after every single Salesforce acqusition. If you think you're different, compare how many new internal promotions there are, how many senior management have left and how many Salesforce transplants there are.

Everyone thought they were the darling child, at least for the first 18 months.

> because salespeople had a hard time understanding how to sell it which seems like a strange reason to give up entirely.

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.

>I have no idea. I hear it's because

So you had an idea after all?

Periwinkle never materialized. Neither did Shinrai, or a number of other projects that people brought up in hn threads about this incident. It’s clear that Heroku has lost a ton of great talent and momentum due to questionable business decisions but some of the most controversial fail to ever make it past codename status.

It's on ice. As you say it's also not the first time they've attempted something like this.

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.

Remember when Salesforce was moving off of Oracle within 2 years? A decade ago..

I wouldn't be surprised if Larry got them CIA/gov't contracts to avoid anything like that happening.

> [..] No more Heroku signups, you'll need a Salesforce account to use it. No more free tier either.

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???

> New features have been banned for years. Only "keep the lights on" projects are allowed.

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.

You've gotta go way back on the Heroku Changelog to find anything that isn't a language version upgrade or feature removal: https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog

I think the feature freeze happened in 2018

The interesting thing is that heroku still is so at the top of what it does, as far as developer UX and ease and reliability. It's hard to describe exactly what i mean, but I know plenty of other people agree. Other things do other things better -- but it's only in the past year or two that some things have started to come close or equal.

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.

Any suggestions on a rival PaaS that has a similar engineering philosophy to the old Heroku?

I was a long time Heroku user/lover (~10 years) for both personal and company projects. I've recently moved to Render[1], and so far it's been great. I haven't been using them long enough to put it through it's paces, but I'd certainly say it's worth a look. Other alternatives I've heard good things about are Fly.io[2] and Porter[3].

[1] - https://render.com/

[2] - https://fly.io/

[3] - https://porter.run/

Checked out render.com in the context of side projects that I want on the air but don't expect anyone to ever use (I have so many on heroku, who got rewarded for their generosity with many thousands of dollars of business from me), which means I'm willing to pay a few dollars but not to pay per-app. Looks great except that they delete your free databases after 90 days, making it completely useless for this use case. Their announcement blog post says they plan to remove this limitation "early 2022", but it hadn't happened yet.

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.

Dokku on top of a Digital Ocean droplet is a pretty cheap and easy option if you're OK with a single-server solution (i.e. small side project) and you're looking for something Heroku-like.

What about DO App Platform? I was thinking of trying that next. I’ve read a lot about slow build times and random build failures, but at the same time they at least seem to be actively developing the service.

Elsewhere in this thread is a link to a blogpost comparing it to doing things manually with GCP and quickly dismissing it as extremely limited, so I didn't delve further.

Heroku only gives you one free app too? Fly.io pricing is a lot cheaper. You can run a small service for $2/month whereas Heroku is $7 minimum.

If you want a more minimal do-it-yourself option you could self-host something like Dokku[1].

[1] https://dokku.com/

I feel confident nobody using heroku is doing it because they want a more minimal do-it-yourself option.

fly.io is an excellent alternative. I am slowly migrating all of my clients over.

Cloud Foundry maybe? Some companies are offering it as a service (e.g: IBM Cloud Foundry)

There's Clever Cloud which I use personally

Youch.

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.

Well, that’s sad. I guess it’s Fly or Digital Ocean for all future projects then.

There is some comparison of DO's App platform and Google's Cloud offerings here if you are interested (not my blog, just found it helpful: https://blog.verygoodsoftwarenotvirus.ru/posts/greener-cloud...)

Don’t forget render.com