But, paradoxically, this has given those engineers free rein to make whatever improvements they deem fit - including things they may have been blocked from working on in the past due to Product meddling and/or corporate bureaucracy.
(Not speaking authoritatively - this situation just, from the outside, appears to have a lot of parallels to teams I've been on that owned "Legacy" services.)
Management: “we’re going into maintenance mode”
Devs: “You mean we get to work on whatever we want?!”
An update of Heroku
The large customers still get what they want as long as the ask isn’t too big and that’s why you see new features even though the product is in maintenance mode.
However, Heroku said they were changing focus. It’s entirely possible to change focus away from something and still do some of it. A focus on things other than new features doesn’t mean, necessarily, no new features at all. Heroku could probably save their customers and partners a lot of anxiety by being clearer and more explicit what they mean.
Maybe we could say they went uphill instead for a while? Or something
So few people used it. I guess this provided a negative signal to their management about the adoption rate of new features. And then everything eventually just died.
True, it can't compete with AWS/GCP/Azure if you're large scale. But most of us are not large scale, we just need a no frills experience instead of dealing with 27 nested panels just to spin up a VM.
I don’t think it’s impossible for them to survive. Salesforce bought them more than 10 years ago and did little to support growth of Heroku. And yet they’re still around and people still ask „is there something new with comparable customer experience?” because they don’t mind paying more
DO has always been a bit rich for my blood though, and even a low cost hetzner VPS has less cores than I remember seeing at the same price a decade ago. I could be wrong there though I usually use Vultr for their SYD region.
Less cores but probably 5x more performance per core now.
