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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.

by infecto11 hours ago|

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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.

by sanderjd9 hours ago|

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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.

by infecto7 hours ago|

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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.

by sanderjd5 hours ago|

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I kind of thought the "15 years" was just one of those things where people kind of forget what year it is. Wow, 2010 was already over 15 years ago?? That kind of mistake. I think this person was thinking pre-2005. I graduated college just after that, and that's when all this cloud and managed services stuff was just starting to explode. I think it's true that before that, pretty much everyone was maintaining actual servers somewhere. (For instance, I helped out with the physical servers for our CS lab some when I was in college. Most of what we hosted on those would be easier to do on the cloud now, but that wasn't a thing then.)

by acdha7 hours ago|

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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.

by iso16317 hours ago|

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> Heroku was wildly popular with startups

The world's a lot bigger than startups

by infecto7 hours ago|

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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.

by unethical_ban7 hours ago|

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SV and financial services are quite different.

It's 2026 and banks are still running their mainframe, running windows VMs on VMware and building their enterprise software with Java.

The big boys still have their own datacenters they own.

Sure, they try dabbling with cloud services, and maybe they've pushed their edge out there, and some minor services they can afford to experiment with.

by infecto6 hours ago|

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If you are working at a bank you are most likely not standing up your own Postgres and related services. Even 15 years ago. I am not saying it never happened, I am saying that even 15 years ago even large orgs with data enters often had in place sys and devops that helped with providing resources. Obviously not the rule but also not an exception.

by unethical_ban6 hours ago|

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True. We had separate teams for Oracle and MSSQL management. We had 3 teams each for Windows, "midrange" (Unix) and mainframe server management. That doesn't include IAM.