Is Heroku Being Sunset?
I'm curious of the veracity of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31291549
It describes a "Project Periwinkle" that essentially would be spinning down Heroku. Is this really happening?
Is it time for me to look for a different host?
This is a major blow to some of us: the free version of Nightscout has been relying on Heroku and they had an insanely meticulously detailed guide to set the whole thing up. https://nightscout.github.io/nightscout/new_user/ I will need to ask them what's next :(
Of course, I could figure out hosting myself, I do have a server but I don't need any more tamagotchis :(
ex-Heroku here.
Can confirm Periwinkle is a thing. It started a couple of years ago.
However, as far as I know, it's also done. The scope was massively reduced once they realised the complexity of what they are trying to do (which isn't sunsetting Heroku, but more moving it in the direction that Salesforce Functions has taken). In the end, Periwinkle essentially transpired to be the banner that you now see at the top of Heroku properties.
Saying that, I've been out a few months. I don't know what the current plans might be, and I do wonder if recent events might have SFDC evaluating what's next.
That post makes a ton of sense honestly. It is a shame but why wouldn’t Salesforce want their branding on it?
Check out Vercel, Fly.io, or DigitalOcean depending on the complexity of the project you’re hoping to deploy.
~10 years ago I had a web proxy on heroku to bypass internet filters. It was used by people in countries like China, as well as by kids (and teachers) in schools. (At one point my highschool blocked google!) Heroku's free tier was always good enough for the server, but I did pay for SSL for a while.
After it had been around for a couple of years, someone accessed a phishing site through my proxy and incorrectly reported to heroku that I was hosting a phishing site, so they froze my account to investigate. I was eventually able to show them that I wasn't actually hosting any phishing site, but then they said that they were planning on changing their TOS to disallow any form of proxies, so they were going to keep me frozen anyways.
So, I stopped using heroku after that. Oh well...
It's kind of sad that Heroku has been left to die a slow death. What it brought to the industry was so far ahead of it's time in setting up easy yet powerful deployments and infrastructure.
Sure, it was never cost effective at scale, but that wasn't the point. The product has been, and continues to be, very inspirational from a customer UX standpoint. I say this as someone that works in deployment and infrastructure tooling. No matter how many "next gen" deployment tools we build to take advantage of the most sophisticated deployment techniques, the pure simplicity and elegance of Heroku was something to behold.
While it's sad that Heroku seems to be on it's way out, it has undoubtedly moved the industry forward and there are a number of compelling options to replace it and this point. Excited to see where the industry moves from here.
I'm not a Salesforce or Heroku employee, I just orbit their space, do projects, listen to podcasts etc. so this is just speculation on my part.
Salesforce is rolling out "Salesforce Functions", like ASW Lambda but for internal Salesforce work. A function is already logged in to your Salesforce account and has access to your data. It's for things that would be hard to do in their proprietary Apex language in the platform.
It's possible they're taking the Heroku resources and staff and getting them ready for Functions.
I have no idea what the financials have ever looked like, but it's really sad and disappointing that a service that used to be so invaluable just gave up their lead and withered. There's definitely a lot of competition as Big Cloud offers more turnkey solutions (rise of serverless) and Small Cloud offers more power (Netlify, Vercel) so Heroku is squeezed on both sides. But they had the chance to fill all those niches first and they just didn't even try.
Yes I've heard this. Lack of product releases since 2019 and the significant reduction in headcount all point to that, still making $300m-500m ARR revenue so not something you should let die lightly...
I'm working on Northflank, a production ready Heroku alternative over at https://northflank.com
Builds, deploys, stateful workloads, advanced networking, crons, API and more.
We moved our projects to fly.io and didn't look back
I have a project that uses Heroku Postgres because they handle high-availability and backups, and because they have some fancy metrics that help find areas for potential optimization[1]. Does anyone have recommendations for an alternative with similar features? As far as I can tell RDS should handle the HA stuff, but it doesn't look like they have query-level metrics.
I'm open to looking at a separate dashboard of some kind for query metrics if necessary, but I pretty much need the reliability features to be abstracted away. This product needs to be reliable to be worth anything, and I handle development/deployments/infrastructure by myself so I don't have the required knowledge or time to build out a proper solution myself.
1: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/expensive-queries
I mean I would understand if they wanted to do some rebranding, but even then I'd rename it to e.g. "Heroku by Salesforce" instead of sunsetting it entirely. It was a good brand, and any brand damage is of their own making (see other comments from insiders).
They didn't want to support Indian Cards for payment by adopting secure practices as per RBI guidelines. One of the big reason I couldn't continue on Heroku.
It for sure feels like it. We are weeks now into the security breach and there basic stuff like the GitHub integration is still down.
Free tier is only feasible by tech giants like the FAANG type of companies that have unlimited resources compared to the rest of us.
What are some good hosts that can compete with Heroku besides AWS?
I wish I had $212m to spend on something just to sunset it.