If Heroku is So Special, Why is It Dying?

upstart writes:

If Heroku is so special, why is it dying?:

[Editors Comment: It seems it might be even more obscure that I thought it was. It is a container system similar to Kubernetes or Docker, but was around a while before them. JR]

With Heroku, there's always a "but." For 15 years, I've heard Heroku described as "magical," as the gold standard for developer experience, as the manna from heaven that the Israelites ate while wandering in the wilderness.

For all its impact, Heroku always seems bigger in its mythology than its reality. I don't mean to say that its impact hasn't been substantial in terms of other services and products it has inspired, but why is Kubernetes and not Heroku the increasingly default way to build and scale applications? Some suggest Heroku was simply ahead of its time. Maybe. Or maybe the price of that magical developer experience was too constrained to work in the modern messiness of enterprise computing.

Heroku is back in the news because it recently announced the elimination of its free tier. Why? As it turns out, it was simply too much work to keep up with the graft that followed a zero-cost tier: "Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans," said Bob Wise, general manager of Heroku and executive vice president at Salesforce, which acquired Heroku in late 2010. Instead of playing Whac-A-Mole with crypto fraudsters, the company hopes to better invest in its customers-of which there probably aren't as many as there should be.

That sounds like criticism but isn't. Perhaps it's the crowd I follow, but I've never heard Heroku mentioned except to praise how it revolutionized deployment of applications. Prior to Heroku, it would take as long or longer to deploy an application as to build it. With Heroku, deployment was as easy as a Git push.

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