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Heroku has long been held up as the gold-standard platform as a service (PaaS) for software developers to easily deploy their code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure, while others see it as akin to a magical fallen civilization with a limited future.
“The history of IT is littered with platforms people thought were fantastic that don’t exist anymore,” said James Governor, a founder of the developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk. “It had a good run and a huge influence, but nothing lasts forever.”
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Heroku’s architectural limitations and the high cost of running a business on the platform have historically hindered its ability to truly scale beyond a core set of web 2.0 customers, but there is still hope that Heroku is setting itself up for a glorious second act.