Comment by acdha
16 hours ago
Heroku was popular with startups who didn’t have infrastructure skills but the price was high enough that anyone who wasn’t in that triangle of “lavish budget, small team, limited app diversity” wasn’t using it. Things like AWS IaaS were far more popular due to the lower cost and greater flexibility but even that was far from a majority service class.
I am not sure if you are trying to refute my lived experience or what exactly the point is. Heroku was wildly popular with startups at the time, not just those with lavish budgets. I was already touching RDS at this point and even before RDS came around no organization I worked at had me jumping on bare metal to provision services myself. There always a system in place where someone helped out engineering to deploy systems. I know this was not always the case but the person I was responding to made it sound like 15 years ago all engineers were provisioning their own database and doing other times of dev/sys ops on a regular basis. It’s not true at least in SV.
I have no doubt that was your experience. My point was that it wasn’t even common in SV as whole, just the startup scene. Think about headcount: how many times fewer people worked at your startup than any one of Apple, Oracle, HP, Salesforce, Intuit, eBay, Yahoo, etc.? Then thing about how many other companies there are just in the Bay Area who have large IT investments even if they’re not tech companies.
Even at their peak, Heroku was a niche. If you’d gone conferences like WWDC or Pycon at the time, they’d be well represented, yes, and plenty of people liked them but it wasn’t a secret that they didn’t cover everyone’s needs or that pricing was off putting for many people, and that tended to go up the bigger the company you talked to because larger organizations have more complex needs and they use enough stuff that they already have teams of people with those skills.
A tricky thing on this site is that there are lots of different people with very different kinds of experience, which often results in people talking past each other. A lot of people here have experience as zero-to-one early startup engineers, and yep, I share your experience that Heroku was very popular in that space. A lot of other people have experience at later growth and infrastructure focused startups, and they have totally different experiences. And other people have experience as SREs at big tech, or doing IT / infrastructure for non-tech fortune 500 businesses. All of these are very different experiences, and very different things have been popular over the last couple decades depending on which kind of experience you have.
Absolutely true but I also think it’s a fair callout when the intent was to disprove the original post asking how old someone was because 15 years ago everyone was stringing together their own services which is absolutely not true. There were many shades of gray at that time both in my experience of either have a sysops/devops team to help or deploying to Heroku as well as folks that were indeed stringing together services.
I find it equally disingenuous to suggest that Heroku was only for startups with lavish budgets. Absolutely not true. That’s my only purpose here. Everyone has different experiences but don’t go and push your own narrative as the only one especially when it’s not true.
1 reply →
> Heroku was wildly popular with startups
The world's a lot bigger than startups
Did you fail to finish reading the rest? At the same time I had touch with organizations that were still in data centers but I as an engineer had no touch on the bare metal and ticket systems were in place to help provision necessary services. I was not deploying my own Postgres database.
Your original statement is factually incorrect.