First - as others have done, I think we have to challenge the premise that Heroku failed. It's still the gold standard 15 years later and the default for many knowledgable folks.
Obviously given the hype around k8s and the order of magnitude difference between the success of the hyperscalers and the scale of Heroku, there's some mismatch btetween what they did and the potential they had. I would say the same about App Engine and AWS's various iterations starting with Elastic Beanstalk.
Overall if we had to bucket the opportunity that still exists to do better in the space, I think it aligned with wrong product and something better than "git push heroku" better than with business model, whole product, or timing (which clearly had a role). Business model is an issue but not against stuff like render, the success of which also pushes against whole product (people are still adopting something very similar).
Agree with craigkerstiens that the next iteration is about apps vs. services, extensibility, and blending different service types (frontend/container/serverless/data) more fully than Heroku (which really only has one type of app) was able to. And is also about lifecycle and SDLC completeness (which helps a lot with security and compliance, too).
As I mention on all these Heroku threads lately, I'm the cofounder of Coherence (www.withcoherence.com) where I think we're taking an interesting stab at what the future looks like here, using first principles to go deeper than other PaaS and integrate dev more deeply, along with more support for extensibility.
Obviously given the hype around k8s and the order of magnitude difference between the success of the hyperscalers and the scale of Heroku, there's some mismatch btetween what they did and the potential they had. I would say the same about App Engine and AWS's various iterations starting with Elastic Beanstalk.
Overall if we had to bucket the opportunity that still exists to do better in the space, I think it aligned with wrong product and something better than "git push heroku" better than with business model, whole product, or timing (which clearly had a role). Business model is an issue but not against stuff like render, the success of which also pushes against whole product (people are still adopting something very similar).
Agree with craigkerstiens that the next iteration is about apps vs. services, extensibility, and blending different service types (frontend/container/serverless/data) more fully than Heroku (which really only has one type of app) was able to. And is also about lifecycle and SDLC completeness (which helps a lot with security and compliance, too).
As I mention on all these Heroku threads lately, I'm the cofounder of Coherence (www.withcoherence.com) where I think we're taking an interesting stab at what the future looks like here, using first principles to go deeper than other PaaS and integrate dev more deeply, along with more support for extensibility.