[HN Gopher] The Story of Heroku
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The Story of Heroku
Author : leerob
Score : 90 points
Date : 2022-05-30 14:22 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (leerob.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (leerob.io)
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| Ironically, we still need a modern hosting company that can
| easily and cheaply run Ruby on Rails applications as well as
| hybrid SSG/SSR frameworks like Bridgetown, plus scale across
| multiple regions without headache. Render seems like the best
| candidate at present. Keeping my eye on Fly as well.
|
| I sure wish Heroku's architecture and pricing structure had
| stayed competitive. I appreciate the stability of a company's
| offerings--especially a hosting company--but there's a difference
| between stability and fossilization!
| mooktakim wrote:
| Article doesn't mention the original name "Heroku Garden". It was
| a playground for Ruby on Rails development. You could go from
| thought to deploy in matter of minutes.
| tylersmith wrote:
| In 2008 I was a junior in high school learning RoR in my free
| time, and the teacher of my required Intro to Computers class
| let me essentially skip the class work if I could build a basic
| social media site in the semester.
|
| The computers were always locked down tight but using Heroku
| Garden and its web editor for Rails apps I made it work. I've
| always been super appreciative of that exact functionality at
| that exact time, even as they grew into a more traditional
| hosting company.
| leerob wrote:
| [Author here] I did not know that! Thanks for sharing, will add
| it. I started using Heroku in 2012 for context, pre in-browser
| IDE form.
| craigkerstiens wrote:
| As a note. There was a popular Rails book at the time that
| was being released, I believe it was Michael Hartl's, but it
| may have been another one back then. The opening of the book
| was "open your web browser and go to herokugarden". On the
| day the book was released Heroku decided to pivot away from
| web based IDE towards the platform. Back then pivots weren't
| as common as they are now, believe Adam gave a talk at this
| at one of Eric Ries conferences.
| sgallant wrote:
| This is a very good framing of Heroku
| bgentry wrote:
| > James, the Co-Founder and CTO of Heroku, coined the term 12
| factor app
|
| That would be Adam Wiggins, not James Lindenbaum, who published
| the 12 Factor App :) I know this because I was there when it
| happened, but also if you check the bottom of the 12 Factor
| website it's quite clear:
|
| > Written by Adam Wiggins
|
| Also, this is not at all accurate:
|
| > GitHub (formerly hosted on Heroku)
|
| GitHub used Heroku for some stuff back then (like their original
| status site) but they absolutely never ran the core of GitHub on
| Heroku.
| leerob wrote:
| Thanks, I've updated the post!
| yoouareperfect wrote:
| Leerob, why hasn't vercel shipped postgresql db's with connection
| pooling built in?
|
| I know you have the marketplace and I could connect to
| PlanetScale... but I don't really want to. Why should I have to
| switch to MySQL from PostgreSQL?
|
| Or even a better question: why can't I use a single host provider
| for my whole app?
| leerob wrote:
| We also have Postgres database providers in our marketplace
| like Supabase. Have you tried them before?
| jverrecchia wrote:
| I also think serverless-friendly managed DBs are the missing
| piece of the puzzle of Vercel's offering. Would be so nice to
| have the whole stack hosted on Vercel instead of needing
| external platforms for that last bit, and complicated pooling
| setups. Hopefully that's somewhere in your guys' roadmap!
| craigkerstiens wrote:
| You can always provision a Crunchy Bridge DB and connect to it,
| we've got a ton of customers using Vercel and connecting their
| app to us. With built-in connection pooling it tends to work
| quite well.
| leerob wrote:
| This is a great option :)
| MattyMc wrote:
| leerob wrote:
| I prefer to explicitly call it out, even if I believe this post
| is a fair summary of the story of Heroku. Are there points you
| disagree with or that are inaccurate?
| pvg wrote:
| It's a great practice, if there's one nit - it's probably
| better to put things like that closer to the beginning of the
| piece so people are less inclined to fish it out of the
| bottom and use it for messageboard battle.
| elbigbad wrote:
| It's well written and interesting, no issues at all imo.
| Thanks for calling it out; no problem with that. Some people
| conflate working for a competing tech with bias, and while
| there could be some, the important thing is to mitigate.
|
| As a contrary example, there's another Heroku story on the
| front page right now that's not interesting or thoughtful at
| all and is just marketing copy for what they're selling.
| MattyMc wrote:
| It's great you disclosed this information, and you wrote an
| excellent article imo.
|
| I hope it's fair to say that you work for a direct competitor
| to Heroku, and that the intention of the article is to share
| how you've learned from the parts of Heroku that people loved
| and are working to build on these ideas in the work you're
| doing (which is great!). I'd prefer knowing that the article
| is written by a competitor at the start versus casually
| towards the end.
|
| I hope I didn't offend you by my comment! :)
| pvg wrote:
| You should just write something like this the first time
| around because just pasting a random line from the article
| ends up looking like the sort of thing the guidelines
| harumph about:
|
| _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an
| article or post to complain about in the thread. Find
| something interesting to respond to instead._
| swyx wrote:
| really wouldnt say vercel is a direct competitor to Heroku,
| insofar as HN is a pretty discerning crew as to how a
| serverless-only platform differs from one that lets you run
| servers.
| leerob wrote:
| Yeah, we have quite a few customers who host their
| frontend on Vercel and their backend on Heroku.
| rckrd wrote:
| Guessing this is a response to the article I wrote that showed up
| on HN last week "Why Did Heroku Fail" [0]
|
| I'm glad the author touched upon some of the outsized
| contributions Heroku made to DevOps and infra. I don't think many
| will argue with that. I was actually thinking of Vercel when I
| wrote the piece. What does a PaaS need to look like in 2022 to
| succeed? The author briefly mentions the current state of Heroku
| -- I think we all will also agree they deserved to capture more
| of the value that they created. The bigger question (in my mind)
| is how?
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372675
| ghaff wrote:
| PaaSs were always sort of a funny in-between category that were
| sort of defined by not being IaaS or SaaS--though I'm not sure
| the NIST definitions are super-useful at this point. As the
| article says, a PaaS like Heroku made it easy for developers to
| get going. OpenShift started as something similar (although
| polyglot) from the Makara acquisition. However, enterprises, by
| and large, found they were too limited.
|
| I agree with the gist of the article that some subset of PaaS
| or would-be PaaS users went to serverless. And many others went
| to Kubernetes-based container platforms--whether on-prem,
| hosted on a cloud, or some cloud-native service like EKS.
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