

Heroku Sunsets the Aspen Stack - thinkbohemian
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/10/2/aspen-sunset/

======
burke
Two thoughts:

1) Interesting that they're not bothering to notify unpaid users of the aspen
stack. Side benefit of this, I guess, is that they can shed some of the
unused, unpaid apps they've accumulated.

2) In light of 1, It'd be nice if there was an easy way to find out if I have
any aspen apps. I had to go to the settings page for each of my apps to find
out I'm using Bamboo and Cedar across the board.

~~~
thinkbohemian
Those paying for Aspen were notified by a personal email from me along with
direct lines for support. We've been increasing our deprecation measures on
the platform and we are ramping up communication to all application owners.
This blog post is one of those steps.

All unpaid apps are put to sleep when not in use to save us costs and to allow
us to continue to off a free tier. (you can get rid of this sleep
functionality by adding an extra dyno). Getting rid of in-active apps really
doesn't buy us mutch, maybe a few megabytes of hard-drive space.

We are interested in all developers having a quality experience on Heroku and
this includes the migrating experience. We differentiate between "production"
and "development" quality applications in a number of areas such as
<https://status.heroku.com>. We consider a production application to have at
least 2 dynos, and a non-shared database. At the end of the day we are not a
free service. We will go above and beyond when possible by offering personal
support to those who need and value it the most.

I would like to add that the number of users of Aspen is incredibly small. If
you don't know already, you probably don't have one.

------
DASD
From the posting, "On Thursday, November 22nd, all applications that have not
requested an extension will no longer be functional. Owners of paid Aspen apps
have been individually contacted about this change. We provided migration
instructions, a contact for requesting an extension, and many of them have
already migrated their apps."

For those of you who were paying for services on Aspen, when did you receive
your notification?

~~~
thinkbohemian
I sent out notifications from my personal account on August 22nd. It took a
bit longer to get the blog post out due to some internal events. So far the
response has been positive. Many people who responded were no longer using
their applications or had forgotten about them. It is hard to under-state just
how few people were still using this stack.

Why do you ask?

~~~
DASD
Simply to get an idea of how Heroku plans to sunset projects/platforms. Making
the jump from free to paid not only means a commitment from you but also from
the payer. Granted most apps are easily migrated but I'm curious how many apps
were done by small(or outsourced) staff where the owner just expects the app
to "just work...for a long,long time." Hence, the reason why Microsoft has
such wonderfully(or excruciatingly) long support lifetimes.

I don't have a paid application so maybe you've touched on some of this in
your letter and also details of the extension support you mentioned.

You sent this from a personal account? Meaning...not @heroku.com? Is there no
formal notification/support e-mail that Heroku uses?

~~~
thinkbohemian
I sent out the notification from my @heroku.com email, and not from an auto
mailer. We have the capability and do send out system wide emails, but I
wanted to personally field any questions or concerns directly.

No one has indicated that they cannot migrate their app at all. A few have
told me that they are not the original developers, but we haven't run into
that exact situation. We do have <http://partners.heroku.com> available for
contract if someone truly was non-technical. Even then, the experience of
hiring contractors for a few hours to work on an app that has been running for
the last 4+ years shouldn't be too bad.

Even in microsoft's case, longer support lifetimes still don't mean infinite
support lifetimes. People still need to migrate and un-necessarily prolonging
the migration can make it much-much harder.

To read up more on our deprecation and sunsetting policies check out my last
blog post: [http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/9/24/sunsetting-and-
dep...](http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/9/24/sunsetting-and-deprecation/)

~~~
DASD
Thanks for taking the time to respond. The ability to shutoff
technology/features is definitely a plus when you are running a PAAS. I've
still got clients that are running large lab operations on NT and also some
clients still running extremely old versions of RPG. None have found the
incentive to rewrite the software along the way.

------
holman
Pro tip: if, like me, you have an ancient app on Aspen and moving it to Cedar
sounds like a horrible, horrible transition, just switch it to Bamboo instead.
Buys you some more time to put it off until they sunset that too.

~~~
bgentry
And also guarantees that you'll have to come back and deal with it again in
the future.

~~~
holman
But it'll also give me a longer deadline than a couple months (which is
important when it's a side project that I don't want to dedicate a lot of time
to).

