Screaming in the Cloud - Heroku’s Resurgence with Adam Zimman

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Corey Quinn welcomes Adam Zimman back to Screaming in the Cloud for a sponsored episode featuring Heroku by Salesforce. As Head of Product Marketing, Adam discusses after years of stagnation following its Salesforce acquisition. Recent investments and a dedicated team signal a renewed focus on developer experience. The duo explores Heroku's impact on modern app development, its role in popularizing the 12-Factor App model, and the decision to retire its free tier. Adam highlights key updates, including Kubernetes replatforming, .NET support, and AI tools for managed inference and agents. He also teases his upcoming book, Progressive Delivery, set for release next year.Show Highlights(0:00) Intro(1:01) Heroku sponsor read(1:39) How Heroku became resurgent(5:46) Heroku’s legacy(9:53) Adam’s thoughts on people’s response to the free tier going away(10:55) Heroku’s target customer(s)(13:51) Heroku sponsor read(14:19) How Heroku saves organizations money and developed over time(20:08) Heroku’s re:Invent announcements(24:53) How modern-day developers have reacted to Heroku’s resurgence(27:47) Where people can learn more about Heroku About Adam ZimmanAdam Zimman is Technologist and Author currently serving as the Head of Product Marketing at Heroku by SalesForce. Previously, he was a Venture Capital Advisor providing guidance on leadership, platform architecture, product marketing, and GTM strategy. He has over 20 years of experience working in a variety of roles from software engineering to technical sales. He has worked in both enterprise and consumer companies such as VMware, EMC, GitHub, and LaunchDarkly.Adam is driven by a passion for inclusive leadership and solving problems with technology. He is a co-author of Progressive Delivery: Build the right thing, for the right people, at the right time. His perspective has been shaped by a degree (AB) from Bowdoin College with a dual-focus in  Physics and Visual Art, an ongoing adventure as a husband and father, and a childhood career as a fire juggler.LinksHeroku’s website: https://www.heroku.com/Adam’s Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/azimman.bsky.socialAdam’s Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@azAdam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamzimman/Personal site: https://progressivedelivery.com/SponsorHeroku: http://heroku.com/

I'm now actually responsible for a significant business. And I want to make sure that I don't have to spend all of my cycles managing the underpinnings in the infrastructure and how the components fit together. I want to focus on the value that I'm bringing to the customer. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. And this promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at Salesforce. What else have they brought us? Well, that's a bit of a

funny story. Adam has been on this podcast once before, back when he was doing other things in other places. We kept talking afterwards and somehow became friends. Our kids spend time together. It turns out we live not that far apart. Please don't look up where that is. Some of you are profoundly creepy. Now, Adam has recently taken a new job as the head of product marketing at Heroku by Salesforce. Adam, a pleasure to see you once again in this context. Corey, always a pleasure. There's a lot of opportunities when running your apps and services in the cloud. Opportunities like updating your applications to handle new features, removing bugs, applying

security patches, or scaling to handle your incredible success. There's no shortage of problems to solve. Wouldn't it be great if there was someone else to manage all of that complexity? Heroku's platform as a service and next-generation platform is here to assist. You build it, you deploy it, and they'll take care of the rest. Visit Heroku.com now to focus on what really matters, your innovation. Let's start at the very beginning, because the last time it seemed germane to the conversation, many of the listeners were in diapers. What is Heroku? Heroku is ultimately a platform as a service.

In fact, it was the first platform as a service back in 2007 when it launched, and it provides developers and operators the ability to build an application, deploy an application, and then Heroku takes care of the rest. The easiest way to think about that is focus on the value that you're actually trying to bring to your customer, as opposed to focusing on all the things that you need to be able to get the value to the customer. A lot of us have good memories of Heroku, and we'll get into that in a minute. But what's been a recurring trope for a long time and a line that everyone laughs at sometimes painfully because it seemed very true is the idea of Heroku is awesome and everyone was trying to build the next Heroku except the company that bought Heroku. It felt like it was trapped in

amber for a long time. The only thing I recall hearing about it in the last decade was when it removed a free tier offering due to abuse and frankly, people doing ridiculous things with it. I get it. I'm not complaining about that. But I am curious as to suddenly what changed. It's like someone over there like snort startled themselves awake like, oh, wait, am I driving? And now it seems that it is resurgent. What happened? I think that this is one of those things where a lot of times when large organizations acquire small startups, there's definitely that kind of like momentary, like excitement at the beginning. And then as it gets kind of integrated, sometimes there are challenges in terms of how the cultures fit together or how the components fit together. And this was definitely, I think, the case with Heroku and Salesforce, where... It was a hug to death scenario? It was, well, a little bit of a hug to death, but also kind of, I think there was a large

portion of folks within Salesforce that saw huge value and opportunity with Heroku, but also saw it as something that Salesforce itself could value. And so initially, this was actually where the Salesforce incorporated Heroku into kind of its core platform team and actually did a lot of work to be able to make a Salesforce be able to grow and scale. Unfortunately, in that process, it kind of lost a lot of the kind of specific resources needed to be able to run it as its own independent business or kind of independent product where like it was basically all of the, you know, marketing resources, all of the kind of sales resources, all of the customer success resources, all of them were kind of flipped over to being like just part of the larger Salesforce machine. And the greatest challenge with that was the fact that Salesforce sells to business app owners and Heroku sells to developers and operators.

Those seem like similar target markets. Yeah, exactly. I was going to say, last time I checked that those are two very different kind of not only users, but buyers. It's like, so there's some things in common, like that they're both carbon-based, which is sort of how you have to start thinking about this. They both also have needs. Those needs sometimes do not seem to live on the same planet as one another. They do not.

And so about a year ago, there was a realization that Heroku still had a significant amount of value to the developer and engineering and operations community. And interestingly, there had been a significant amount of just organic growth that had taken place because people continued to actually value a very ergonomic developer experience. And that was something that Heroku had made its name on and people continued to buy it, use it, scale it, all the things. But even without that kind of direct effort, it was taking place. And so they said, Hey, wait, what if we actually put more effort behind that and spin it out to the side so that it can actually run as an independent division.

And that is when, you know, kind of, you know, some things started changing with regards to the executive community. My boss, Betty Janud joined back in August of this year. And that was when, you know, kind of the marketing team really kind of got a huge, you know, that snort jolt that you were talking about. We have an amazing story. What if we deviate from tradition and actually tell it for a change? Yeah, it's a great change. I want to emphasize here because I'm certain I make jokes about being old, but it is a near certainty that people listening to this are completely unaware in some cases of just how impactful and transformative Heroku is. I'll give you an easy example.

It shaped the way that I think about deploying things. The idea of a golden path, so to speak, where you have to build your application, structure it in a certain way. And as long as you do that, then it's click the button simple as far as getting that up and running and deploying it in a way that makes sense.

You start talking about what Heroku requires and people are like, well, yeah, isn't that just the 12-factor app approach? Yes, it is. The 12-factor app methodology was made at Heroku. That is how venerable this thing is. It's as long as you do this, it's on rails and it will build and work surprisingly well. And a lot of great stuff was built on it. Like now you look at this and I still don't see a reasonable competitor that can step to it just in the sense of, yeah, just build your app this

certain way and we'll run it for you. Everything that came after seems to be prescriptive in all the wrong ways, instead of talking about principles. Instead it's, no, no, you need this file with this name, needs to live exactly here. And that is not something people are going to go along with in the same way as you need to separate out your configuration from your code. Environment variables should dictate a lot of behaviors, et cetera, et cetera. No, absolutely. And I think that the 12 factor was a huge part of what made Heroku successful and continues to make Heroku, you know, the choice for a lot of developers.

I think that also this was, you know, part of the reason why, you know, we kind of as part of our, you know, kind of relaunch or repush of, you know, actually making Heroku the next Heroku. We're kind of open sourcing the 12 Factor as a project to say, hey, look, we want to get some more input on how things have changed in the past decade from, you know, our peers in the industry. We were halfway through our Rip Van's Winkle Snooze and we wound up waking up. We should probably see if anything's different now. Well, and I think that a lot of it's still the same. You know, a lot of it's still the same.

There are some minor adjustments that, you know, we've, you know, kind of recognized, we've gotten some good feedback from members of the community. Some large organizations have also offered to, you know, participate in this. And it's been great to be able to kind of get some refresh and some fresh eyes on the 12 factor. You know, one thing that, you know, kind of we are looking to maintain before you ask is, yes, we are planning to keep it at 12. We think that that is still a good number. And also, the reality is that those 12 factors that were initially articulated by Adam Wiggins were actually really good places for us to consider what makes a sustainable, scalable application. And so that's something that we want to kind of continue down. I think that that's a great approach. It's an important approach. And I think that there is a, I guess, lack of respect given to tradition, particularly in tech, where anything that's terrific in hindsight seems perfectly obvious. So, well, yeah, what's the big deal about this? Well, yeah, the second time a revelation is easy, the first time it changes the world.

The only time I can really recall hearing much about Heroku in recent years, as I alluded to, was when the free tier wound up going away, which frankly, I looked at that and, okay, now it costs $5 a month or $7 a month or something to run a project, at which point I stopped listening to the whining about it. It's, well, I had this free thing that I spent hundreds of hours of my life on. Great. And part of the beautiful thing about something like Heroku is that when it's that prescriptive, by the fact that you can run this on Heroku, I automatically know that it will be relatively

straightforward and easy to host somewhere else. Which means if that is so unsound for you, great, go ahead and do it yourself. Maybe you'll get an appreciation for what it takes to run a platform and learn for yourself. It's not like you appreciation for what it takes to run a platform and learn for yourself. It's not like you're suddenly enterprise tier only starting at 5,000 bucks. That would be a little more, okay, I have problems here. Charge more. It's a good philosophy. I know this will be shocking to you and members of your audience, but what we found was that

there was actually a lot of abuse and fraud that was taking place on the free tier. That is my business model. What are you talking about? Exactly. And also, you know, I'd point out to, you know, anyone that is, you know, really kind of bent out of shape about this is that, like, I think we do want to continue to foster and support the community and do recognize that there are folks who, you know, especially in like, as you're just getting started and you are still getting an education, whether it's in computer science or you've decided that your marketing degree needs you to be able to run a small application, we do still have a free tier

offering for the education through the GitHub Education Starter Pack. And so that is still an option for folks who are looking to get started and understand, you know, how things work. It's just we realized that like, we didn't need to continue to do this for the broader community. And frankly, by having it not be free, we're making sure that people are paying better attention to what they're running there, running things that actually are still relevant to the projects that they're working on. And it gives us the ability to be able to provide a better level of service. Pricing has always been one of those things that is a, it is marketing. It is speaking

very clearly in an unambiguous way to people to tell them whether or not they are your target customer. You now start at $5 a month, which is well within the approval authority of every engineer I think I know. And at the high end, you also have the, this is the watchword of enterprise of contact us for preferred pricing on your site. So my question is this, given that you are Salesforce, which probably has some thoughts on this, who is your target customer for this? Interestingly, this is something that as I've been coming up to speed at Heroku, and granted, I've only been there for a little over a month.

And yet they've let you speak to someone in public already. Wow, you must have impressed someone. Oh, that's right. That's not Amazon. We have to go through 18 rounds of training to be able to answer, read a talking point to someone. Oh, I haven't done my press and analyst training yet. Oh, even better. Oh, I didn't say that out loud, did I? No, say what? I said, don't worry about it. I'm talking with a friendly, you know, person, you know, everything, nothing could go wrong. When would I ever make a unfortunate observation about something? Please continue.

Yeah. So for the interesting part about Heroku in terms of how we think about the market is that this is what's been kind of really interesting and fascinating to me in why, you know, I thought the opportunity to go and work with Betty at Heroku would be fun. And yes, I did use fun in the context of work. It's really kind of three separate markets that were, you know, kind of communicating and like trying to engage with. One is this kind of like bottoms up, you know, product led growth, you know, community that Heroku has long time been known for, right? And this is just, you know, hey, look, I just need something to be able to get up and running quick. I don't want to have to think about all of the underpinnings. I just want to, you know, build the thing and go. And that's still there. Then there's this, you know, kind of enterprise

side, which is I'm now actually responsible for a significant business. And I want to make sure that I don't have to spend all of my cycles managing the underpinnings in the infrastructure and how the components fit together. I want to focus on the value that I'm bringing to the customer. And so this gives the developers and the operators the ability to focus on that value as opposed to focusing on, you know, like, which 57 services from AWS do I need to combine in the right configuration to ensure that I can provide service to people in Germany and people in Northern California. The third segment, I think this is the one that is most interesting to me is because of the Salesforce acquisition, a huge

opportunity to enable the Salesforce products in a way that people are looking to be able to scale and grow those offerings and connect them to external components in a way that without Heroku and without this kind of additional compute would be extraordinarily complicated. And the best part about Heroku in that context is that it stays within the security envelope of Salesforce. So all your data doesn't have to deal with like going and being visible outside of that context. Build, deploy, and scale the easy way with Heroku from Salesforce. Focus on building unique value

instead of managing architectural complexity. Heroku helps millions of developers and operators deliver and scale the applications and services that power their business. Built for developers and operators by developers and operators. Visit heroku.com now to learn more. I used to do a lot of work with startups before I founded this place. And a lot of things that came out of that conversation were of the form, well, we've been running on Heroku and we think we can save a bunch of money now by moving it to AWS directly. What is the tipping point? I started my career trajectory early in caring about saving money. What people were surprised by was my answer of probably around $70,000 to $80,000 a month on Heroku is time to maybe start considering this. And they were very surprised by that answer. They

thought I was going to talk about at least an order of magnitude less than that. It's, I don't think that you realize, given you've built your entire company on top of a platform as a service, just how much work this system is doing for you under the hood. It's, there is so much stuff that you are just completely oblivious to. At a minimum, you are going to need to hire at least a person, probably two, three, if you want to be responsible and have an on-call, to manage the care and feeding of this for you. And there's going to be a lot of finicky things that go into that, that you're benefiting from by this for you. And there's going to be a lot of finicky things that go into that, that you're benefiting from by this platform existing. And it was sort of an eye opener for

some of these folks who just never considered this like, oh, just, just running the thing. How hard could it be? Well, turns out that I have an entire industry to answer that question. One of the things that's, you know, also kind of when you start to like peel back the layers of the onion and look under the hood at Heroku, you also start to realize that a lot of people think of the Heroku Dino. The naming of Dino and versus DynamoDB, like when I was young and foolish, I thought they were related somehow. Yeah. Special terminology for special people.

They're not the same for anyone else confused like I was back then. Thank you for the clarification. No, I mean, I think a lot of folks, you know, kind of because we advertise it as like, this is like your compute component. A lot of people kind of equate that to the costs that they'd have with like ECS or something like that. And the reality is, is that being able to run like a single dyno is like I was talking about earlier. It's the encapsulation of dozens of services from AWS that if you're going to go and build the equivalent to be able to run that, you know, one instance for or even multiple instances, the amount of services that you're actually consuming from AWS is significantly more than just the compute. And so when you think about the kind of price comparison, it's not just about all the services and everything that you need to layer on top to be able to get your idea all the way to your customer. It's also the, you know, kind of like you said, the ongoing maintenance and operational costs associated with, okay,

well, now you've got to start to think about how you're going to do your updates, how you're going to do your, how you're going to do your alerting. All of those components are going to be things that you need to layer on top that Heroku is there to help you with and make it just press the easy button, right? You want to make sure that you're actually focused on building an application that is valuable to a customer is hard enough. And, you know, kind of you can strip away all the things that have been commoditized and make it so that somebody else is taking care of it for you. You're always going to be better off. One thing that I also think that folks still equate Heroku to that for its first few years

of existence, it supported any color you want as long as it's black, like the Model T. Yeah, any language you want as long as it's Ruby. Now it supports the usual gamut of things that you would expect it to see. I also see that it's not necessarily immune from hype cycles, for lack of a better term. Earlier this year in Paris at KubeCon, you folks made the announcement that you would be replatforming onto Kubernetes. Who lost a bet? I mean, I think that Google did, you know, in terms of the Kubernetes question. Yeah, that's a separate episode, I suspect. But yeah, look, I think that we have, you know,

the interesting thing is that, like I was just we have, you know, the interesting thing is that like I was just talking about, you know, it's hard enough to deliver value. So why spend time on the things that have been commoditized? And, you know, one of the things that's interesting about the, you know, kind of original Heroku platform is that this was before, you know, like we even had, this was built before there was like consistent container standard that was defined. It was founded in roughly the same year as AWS first went GA. Right. So Heroku actually uses its own proprietary container format. And so one of the things that we were looking at was how do we actually provide better value

to the community by using, you know, and updating the standards that we're using to be aligned with where other folks are building. And so looking at the kind of cloud native, you know, we're just like, look, we've got 17,000 different things that we can choose from and realize that, hey, wait, we should take a look at some of these projects. We should take a look at how these architectures have changed since we first built the platform. And what are the things that we should be building on to provide the kind of best, most stable, most transportable layer for our consumers. And so by moving to Kubernetes, we also gain a lot of other benefits in the kind of cloud native space where we're able to, you know, implement, you know, open telemetry as well for being able to provide for greater

functionality and plug and play functionality with the community in that space. And, you know, really kind of have the ability to be able to do more with all of the new trends that have taken place in modern application development. You know, this also goes back to, like, you know, you mentioned our language support. We even went so far as to, you know, announce just this past month that we have launched.NET support. And I think the ultimate comment from the community was, finally, yes. But ultimately, this is the first language that we've added in five or nine years.

So it's really kind of one of those things where we realized that, hey, look, as we move into more and more enterprise that are looking to leverage Heroku as their platform of choice, being able to go to where the builders are is something that's really helpful. You made a few announcements at reInvent that I did not pick up on because it was reInvent. My firm belief remains that if you have a data breach to announce,

reInvent's a great place for it because no one will be paying attention to anything that isn't on the keynote stage. What did you announce? At reInvent, we kind of came out with an announcement of a few different things. There were kind of a few pillars to our announcement. One was this notion of the replatforming. So we're moving from, you know, for folks that have been using Heroku's platform, which we refer to as Cedar, we announced a new platform, which will be named Fur, because we name all of our platforms after trees.

Salesforce, the woodland creature environment. No, I think that Salesforce has the mascots of woodland creatures and therefore naming after trees to make sense, right? They need a forest in which to play. So that was the first part of it. And that's the kind of replatforming on the cloud native tooling. The second part was around.NET and being able to make sure that people knew that we were adding that language. And then the third part was we actually realized that another thing that has really changed from an industry perspective,

there's this thing called AI that maybe you've heard of. No, what's that? And I believe you're mispronouncing it. It's IE as a feral corporate scream. Yes, it is somewhat of a battle cry. But we realized that this trend of wanting to be able to build, whether it's agents or components with AI, it is actually a bit cumbersome for a lot of people to be able to figure out how to get started.

And so what we've done is we've created this feature that we call managed inference and agents, which gives people the ability to kind of jumpstart that in the same Heroku fashion of being able to have that kind of instantly composed application package, we're actually of the ability to be able to do the updates to those models baked into the Heroku layer so that you don't have to deal with managing that yourself and hopefully giving people the ability to create more and more, i.e. things that they can leverage for their business and applications. Which is important. Meeting people, including trends, where they are remains a corporate best practice. I am railing against the tide. I know this about myself. Now, my question for you is, as you take a look at the plethora of platforms that have risen since the heyday of Heroku, it is clearly a much more crowded marketplace now. How do you view what Heroku is offering compared to the modern day equivalents

that didn't have to figure this all out themselves in first principle, but rather follow the trail that you and others blazed for them? So for the listeners out there, because you already know this, Corey, but for the last four, four and a half years, I've actually been working as an advisor to venture capital firms. And so in that context, in that term, I've heard over about 250 pitches, you know, that, you know, have heavily related to AI. But also, I'd say that I probably heard about 30 that were, you know, where the kind of initial slide was, you know, kind of like, here's our company name. We're going to be the next Heroku.

The real VC pitch is Heroku, Uber for Heroku with an AI play attached. Or just, you know, like we're going to try and build the, you know, internal developer platform and or we're going to build the next Paz that is Heroku for Kubernetes. And it's like, OK, I really appreciate them, them you know kind of paving the path for me coming into this role as a head of product marketing where they've basically said look heroku is the de facto standard heroku is the one that is going to provide you with that uh you know kind of seminal user and developer experience that you want and that you need and that you've you know been using for the past almost decade or almost two decades.

So this is like something that I think is really powerful for Heroku and to make sure that we're leveraging it and saying, hey, look, sure, there's definitely gonna be other players in the space, but the reality is that we've been doing this a long time and we continue to provide what we believe is the best experience for our users and consumers.

And we just need to make sure that we're continuing to listen to them and providing them with the features that they need to make their businesses successful. Yeah, I think that that is probably one of the smarter approaches you could take. The world is changing. Trying to pretend that, oh, we're just going to act like it was back in 2015 does not work. It is the interplay is different, at least in technology. I'm sure that does not apply to many industries who are what we colloquially call happy.

But, you know, here we are. What I'm curious about, though, is have you found that as you've sort of come out of hibernation, how have modern day developers reacted to this? Has it been with excitement? Has it been with a, you had your chance? Has it been a who? What is the, what is the general reception been? I mean, in general,

the reception has been extraordinarily positive. I think there's some hesitation in terms of, you know, like you pointed out at the beginning of our episode, there was a kind of radio silence period. Right. And so like, I think one of the things that I've seen consistent in the feedback that I've had directly with other developer friends of mine is show me, don't tell me. And I want to see that you're actually investing. I want to to put spin on anything. I want to actually just talk more about the stuff that we're doing. And so something that I've been trying to work closely with engineering and product on is making sure that as we continue to push features out the door, that we're doing a better job talking about them. We're telling people about the value. We're telling people about what we've built. We're continuing to make sure that our documentation is top-notch. We're continuing to make sure that our in-app experience and console experience actually introduces people to the features that are

going to be useful to them and not just stuff that is, you know, kind of, you know, some random add-on that we've put in place. Like, how do we make sure that the things that we're building actually tie back to making our customers successful? It's always the hard problem. It's carrying less on some level about what it does for Salesforce's strategy, because it won't do anything unless it addresses customer needs. That has to come first. I think Amazon has shown us the way in that particular approach. And I think that this is where I think we're seeing some interesting traction with the

larger Salesforce organization. One of the things that Salesforce has been doing this huge push on is with agent force. you know, we're seeing some interesting traction with the larger Salesforce organization. You know, one of the things that Salesforce has been doing this huge push on is with agent force and realizing that, you know, like, I think there's definitely some, you know, kind of feedback of like, you know, add an agent to everything, right? Like it may not be the best idea. But when you start to think about what the benefit is to being able to provide better experiences for people that are looking for help. Right. And I think that that's where, you know, you start to kind of see the value that computers can actually bring to our technology landscape is can't we actually use them to give us the things that we are looking for. And doing so in the context of Salesforce, where this is where all your, you know, kind of customer data has been, you know, trusted. Let's make sure that we're actually using it appropriately and giving the customers a better experience that is more

direct and, you know, more useful to them. And Heroku is, you know, looking to kind of be a part of that, right? Making sure that we're helping Salesforce and its products and be more useful to the customer. If people want to learn more about this and try it for themselves so they can see what all the hubbub is about and why old people are excited and other folks don't seem to know

what we're talking about, where can they go? Heroku.com, still the best place to start. And we will, of course, put a link to that in the show notes. Separately, isn't, I heard a whispers about a podcast or a book or something like that from your direction. What's up with that?

Yeah. So, you know, last time I was on with you, I mentioned that I had been working on a book with a few co-authors. So James Governor, Heidi Waterhouse and Kim Harrison. We are now at the point where we are in kind of full on edit mode with our publisher, IT Revolution Press. And we've got a cover, which I'll help, I'll share with you so that you can share it in the show notes.

And we've got, you know, a kind of second draft in progress. And we're hoping to have our publication kind of second half of next year. Looking forward to talking more about progressive delivery and how folks can make sure that they're building the right thing for the right people at the right time. Which is sort of the theme we've just had, we spent the last half hour talking about. So you're definitely on brand for that. At the same time, I was considering writing a book as you were, and you have gotten into the full editing stage, whereas mine is still an item on the whiteboard of things to do someday. Well, you know, the nice part is that the longer you leave it on the whiteboard, the harder it is to erase. Exactly. There's a beautiful metaphor in

there somewhere. Adam, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I deeply appreciate it. Always a pleasure, Corey. Thank you. Adam Zimmon, head of product marketing at Heroku by Salesforce. I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment pointing out that Google App Engine was in fact the first platform as a service offering. Doesn't change the fact that you're wrong because Heroku predates it by a year. Yes, it's been around that long.