February 11, 2026
Zombie cloud or comeback kid?
Heroku Is Not Dead
Fans mourn, skeptics cry 'zombie', insiders swear it’s alive
TLDR: Ex-Heroku insider says it’s alive, focusing on stability. Commenters call it a “zombie”—without new features or big enterprise deals and with rivals like Supabase/Vercel, they argue it’s alive on paper but fading fast.
A former Heroku insider just dropped a heartfelt “it’s not dead” post—complete with tales of building internal tools, getting the CEO to say “uwu,” and even a Minecraft cameo—but the crowd is not buying the resurrection tour. The official update says Heroku is “actively supported” with a focus on quality over new features, and that line set the comments on fire. One fan-turned-critic declared, “this sentence… seals the death,” pointing to flashier rivals like Supabase and Vercel that now define the developer vibe. In plain terms: people want new toys, not just maintenance.
Then came the doom bells: another commenter claimed Heroku stopped signing enterprise contracts (the big-company deals that keep platforms like this afloat—PaaS/SaaS means “platform/software as a service”), warning, “if it’s not dead now, it’ll die soon.” The mood swung from nostalgic (“Rails-era magic!”) to brutal (“market passed it by”). The jokes landed hard too—“It’s pining for the fjords,” a Monty Python dead-parrot meme—while moderator dang dropped a link to a 347-comment brawl.
So, is Heroku a stable classic or a cloud zombie? The insider says the lessons are blameless and the platform lives; the internet counters: if stability means no sparkle, the party’s moved to Supabase/Vercel. Drama level: high, confidence level: low.
Key Points
- •The author, a former Heroku production engineering tech lead (2021–2024), believes Heroku is not dead after speaking with current employees.
- •They managed over thirty internal services, including AWS account/resource management, CloudTrail ingestion, secrets and certificate management, DNS management, infrastructure‑as‑code, and an OSQuery fleet.
- •The team interfaced extensively with Salesforce security, compliance, and reliability organizations in the post‑acquisition context.
- •An internal platform named “uwu” was created to address operational pains and was presented internally.
- •The author emphasizes ethical, blameless sharing of lessons about organizational dynamics and growth/un‑growth pains, reacting to Heroku’s recent update blog.