Heroku Walked So Railway Can Run

Railway, a company focused on enhancing developer experience, reflects on the decline of Heroku, a once-beloved platform for deploying web applications, emphasizing the lessons learned and their relevance to current cloud infrastructure trends. Heroku's initial success stemmed from its ability to simplify the deployment process for Ruby on Rails applications, offering features like the transformative "git push heroku master" command. However, it faced challenges as the cloud ecosystem matured, with new technologies like Docker and Kubernetes offering open, flexible alternatives to Heroku's proprietary buildpacks. Heroku's reliance on AWS for its infrastructure and its failure to adapt to evolving industry standards, such as containerization, contributed to its decline. Railway seeks to carry forward Heroku's legacy of simplifying developer workflows while embracing open standards to ensure scalability and control, learning from Heroku's journey to avoid similar pitfalls and remain relevant in a rapidly changing technological landscape.