PaaS Heroku’s misleading of customers poisons the cloud

Grazed from The Register. Author: Jim Clark.

Platform-as-a-service Heroku spent two years misleading customers because it was so focused on building a new product that it didn’t bother to update old documentation – this is unacceptable. The Salesforce-owned company admitted on Wednesday that customers using its ‘Bamboo" application automation technology could have spent two years paying for a service that used different tech to that found in Heroku’s docs, and that this tech entailed poor app performance that was nearly impossible for both Heroku and Heroku analytics partner New Relic to detect.

An equivalent situation would be a logistics company announcing it had not informed customers that it had shifted from using a central dispatcher to direct its trucks, to a system where each driver had a list of all packages and had to work out the delivery order with other drivers with no central command. Moreover, that this change meant packages were not getting delivered on time and that it had no way of informing customers of the tardiness of their packages…

Here’s what Heroku said on Wednesday in an FAQ document responding to the customer concerns provoked by its undocumented shift from intelligent routing to random routing:

Since early 2011, high-volume Rails apps that run on Heroku and use single-threaded web servers sometimes experienced severe tail latencies and poor utilization of web backends (dynos). Lack of visibility into app performance, including incorrect queue time reporting prior to the New Relic update in February 2013, made diagnosing these latencies (by customers, and even by Heroku’s own support team) very difficult…

Read more from the source @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/03/heroku_cloud_fail_blights_industry/