Dear Heroku: Uhh... What’s Going On?

Dear Heroku,

As friends, long time marketplace-partners, supporters, and customers, we here at Judoscale — along with so many others from the developer community — are a bit confused about what’s going on over there in San Francisco. Frustrations aside, we’re having a hard time figuring out what to think about this whole ‘Heroku thing’.

First came the blog post on February 6th that, sort of out of nowhere, announced that:

Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support… with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features…

Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers…

Which, full disclosure, sounds an awful lot like a product going into “Maintenance Mode”, even if that specific phrase isn’t said. Speaking of specific phrases, what exactly is a “sustaining engineering” model? Respectfully, that feels like a phrase cooked up in a corporate PR meeting.

But then came new features? 🤔 In mid March we saw slug sizes increase for the first time I can remember (which is genuinely helpful, thank you!), updates to the automatic SSL cert provisioning pipeline so it runs more frequently (cool!), and… the entire CLI was rebuilt (!?). Um.. these feel like new features and platform progress, not maintenance mode… 😵‍💫

Add to that a round-up post from the Head of Product and Engineering that doubled down on “Sustaining Engineering” (capitalized this time!):

We will continue releasing features and functionality that align with our Sustaining Engineering goals…

…but I thought “sustaining engineering” was

rather than introducing new features

I’m not trying to be pedantic here, I’m just confused. What are we developers/customers/teams supposed to expect from Heroku at this point?

Heroku and/or Salesforce leadership/PR/etc. team(s), can I humbly offer you a few thoughts?

Just Tell Us Straight

Developers notoriously hate corporate verbiage, PR plays, and implications. “Sustaining engineering” feels like the embodiment of all three of those. If Heroku is going into maintenance mode, cool — the platform is pretty great and if it never improved again, there’s still many years of life in it. Just call it that, then. What do the actual devs at Heroku think of all of the recent news, terms, and reactions? I’d be curious for their insights.

Open The Roadmap

And, as noted above, if that roadmap is “do nothing, just keep it running”, that’s fine. But if there are things on the roadmap, it’d be really great if that was made public. Wasn’t Fir going to ship to the common runtime? Aren’t there Postgres updates to be made? There must be some cost optimizations to be made on several fronts… developers would be thrilled to actually see what Heroku’s priorities are, even if they can’t interact with them or influence them.

Clarify Business Intent

Look, we get it. Developers are pragmatic people. We understand there are seasons to products and platforms and businesses and companies. Not everything lasts forever — we’ve all had Node packages that we regret installing. From where I’m standing, I’m guessing Heroku as a product is in one of two places:

1. We just want to focus on direct-billing customers and maintain a smaller budget and team to do that. We’ll continue to move forward, but direct-billing is our outlook now; enterprise isn’t our goal anymore
2. We’re looking to exit major investing in the platform altogether, but obviously it will keep running and we’ll keep fixing issues and bugs for many years to come

It’d be really helpful if someone could inform us which of those two roads Heroku leadership is choosing.

Again, this is coming from a (small) team of people who have loved and hosted on Heroku nearly along as Heroku has existed. We care deeply about the platform and its future! We, and all those that we’ve talked to thus far, would just like to know what that future is.

Sincerely,

The Judoscale Team