Is Heroku Still Relevant?
Heroku has long been held up as the gold-standard platform as a service (PaaS) for software developers to easily deploy their code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure, while others see it as akin to a magical fallen civilization with a limited future.
âThe history of IT is littered with platforms people thought were fantastic that donât exist anymore,â said James Governor, a founder of the developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk. âIt had a good run and a huge influence, but nothing lasts forever.â
Founded in 2007 by three Ruby developersâJames Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion HenryâHeroku was bought just three years later, when the SaaS giant Salesforce eventually beat out VMware to pick the company up for $212 million when it still had only 30 people on staff and supported only the Ruby programming language.
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âThe next big thing for Heroku is the deep integration of its capabilities with the rest of the Salesforce Platform via Salesforce Functions,â a Salesforce spokesperson said. Salesforce Functions âlets developers write code that integrates with their data and events on the Salesforce Platform, then run it on-demand with elastic scale in a serverless environment.â
If serverless were to become the next industry standard, there is certainly an opportunity there for Heroku to reshape itself for that next wave of change. âI would leapfrog microservices for serverless if I did this again today,â said PensionBeeâs Lister Parsons. âServerless could be the âphoenix from the ashesâ moment for Heroku.â
I still use Heroku for some projects but itâs usage is getting less and less.