> We’ve heard your feedback on our communications during this incident. You want more transparency, more in-depth information, and fewer “we are working on it” posts.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
This all somehow seems unsurprising. If anyone has tried to use Heroku in easily the last year, the number of times you get failed builds over really trivial things is noticeable.
I haven’t experienced a failed build in a few years.
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.