We have a saying around the Heroku team thanks to our awesome engineering leader Gail Frederick. She reminds us of this often: “Feedback is a gift”. These are words we try to live by both internally and with our customers.
Feedback: What is Heroku investing in? What has shipped?
We had a very busy 2022! We just published the product retrospective for last year here.
You’ve given us really positive feedback on the openness of our public roadmap, and many customers have told us they love it. Our top voted ideas around more fine grained security features, GitHub integration and larger compute and data plans are now integral to our roadmap planning. We will continue to use and refine this. Thank you so much for all the engagement.
Feedback: Clarify Account Suspension Policy
We’ve heard customer concerns about our account suspension policy for acceptable use violations. Our policy is that we do not suspend paying customers without giving them recourse, humans are in the loop, and we do not delete accounts, apps, or data when we suspend a customer for violations of terms of service, pending resolution of the suspension. However, we will continue to terminate dynos running apps that violate our terms of use, as we have a commitment to our customers to keep everyone safe.
For clarity and as a reminder to customers currently on Postgres v9.6, if no action is taken by February 25, 2023, we will begin revoking access to databases running PostgreSQL 9.6. Non-compliant databases are subject to deletion in accordance with our customer agreements. It is critical to your safety to move off of versions of Postgres that are out of community support which includes security patching. For more information refer to this article.
Feedback: Improve Status Postings
We’ve heard that our status postings at status.heroku.com could be more actionable and useful. You should expect to see more helpful and actionable information when we make posts there. However, this comes with a tradeoff: we will take the time and care to ensure we understand the potential impacts to customers and to give actionable guidance. We are also going to reach out to customers directly via email when we have smaller numbers of customers impacted so that the impacted customers know more concretely that they are affected, and customers that are not affected are not wondering if they are impacted when they are not.
Feedback: Please Help Open Source Projects
Heroku is built on open source, and home to a wide range of open source applications. We want to give back by providing free capabilities for qualifying open source projects. We are announcing a Heroku credits program for open source projects starting in March 2023. The program grants a platform credit every month for 12 months to selected projects. Credits are applicable to any Heroku product, including Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres, and Heroku Key-Value Store; and cannot be applied to paid third-party Heroku add-ons. An application process is open now, with applications reviewed monthly starting in March 2023. We have more info here on how to apply, as well as the terms and conditions of the program.
Please keep talking to us....
As always, if you want to send me a gift of feedback directly, you can find me here. If you prefer to use Twitter, please DM to Andy Fawcett (@andyinthecloud, https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyfawcett/) who runs Heroku product, or Gail Frederick (@screaminggeek, https://www.linkedin.com/in/gfred/) who runs Heroku engineering. The Heroku team will be at TDX in March, we hope to see some of you in person there. Last but not least, we are excited to open invites to join our Heroku customer research program to help shape the future of our platform. As a participant, you’ll have a direct impact on our roadmap and help us build better solutions for you and our community.
-Bob Wise