Platform · 2007–2023 · Cloud Scale
Heroku
git push deploy and twelve-factor bliss. The PaaS that taught a generation what deploy should feel like — then priced them out.
Heroku faded because free-tier removal and stagnant product under Salesforce broke the funnel that fed its culture. It failed to compete with AWS complexity on one side and Fly.io/Railway on the other. The ideas stuck in Docker and serverless; the purple deploy button did not.
Cost of the fad
Free-tier sunsetting and Salesforce neglect sent hobbyists and startups shopping mid-project. Dyno pricing that made sense at demo scale became a line item at traction.
Context
Split everything, then pay for the glue
Hyperscale patterns escaped the companies that needed them. Containers unified packaging; Kubernetes became the cloud OS; microservices and NoSQL were sold as defaults. Mobile-first stuck because screens changed. Cargo-cult distributed systems stuck around as invoices. The durable move was packaging and ops maturity — not rewriting every app into a mesh.
Compare with
Related
Platform · 2013–now
Docker / Containers
Ship the environment with the code. The packaging unit of modern compute.
Architecture · 2015–now
Serverless-first
Functions as the unit of deploy. Brilliant for spikes and glue; awkward as a whole product architecture.
Framework · 2004–now
Ruby on Rails
Convention over configuration. Taught a decade of frameworks how to ship MVPs — and how to hit scaling walls.