The story isn't too interesting in itself. It's mainly about a Heroku (a
cloud "platform" vendor popular with Ruby on Rails developers) customer
complaining about his chosen vendor platform not scaling as well as he thought
it should, and about the expensive performance analytics software not being
worth the money he was paying for it and so demanding refunds. What did catch my
interest was the following:
To which the first group would
respond: “Sure we got something, but Heroku also TOOK from us without asking. We
spent a bunch of time optimizing performance in the wrong places and people
using our site got a worse experience than we understood, which caused us to
lose users. Finally, Heroku has us locked in: because we've grown in traffic
and application complexity, moving to another host is much more difficult now
than it would have been 2 years ago”
to give a bit of
background, a web 2.0 company called "Rap Genius" (and no I've never heard of
them either, and have no idea what they do) wrote their web site using "Ruby on
Rails", which was all the rage a couple of years ago. Heroku started as a value
added hosting provider which catered to the "I write Ruby on Rails sites on my
Macbook while sitting in Starbucks" crowd. Ruby on Rails itself isn't tied to
Heroku, but it's possible to write all sorts of assumptions into your
application which depend on Heroku features.
Now roll forward a couple
of years, and "Rap Genius" find out that Heroku's "intelligent traffic routing"
doesn't really scale up to large volumes of web traffic. Furthermore, Heroku is
now saying "Ruby on Rails man? Are you still using that grandpa? Everybody is
doing async with NodeJS now. Get with the times!" I can't see this ending well.
The moral that I take from this story is that today's "cloud" is like
yesterday's "operating system". If you aren't careful, you will lock yourself
into a single vendor and depend on them to deliver the results for you. An open
cloud platform gives you vendor independence so you can move to a different
hosting provider if the current one doesn't deliver. It's something to keep in
mind when making your future plans.
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