According to TechCrunch, “Heroku, the popular cloud application platform, may not be quite as fast today as it was three years ago.  Yesterday, Rap Genius‘ James Somers , posted a widely read blog post, arguing that Heroku had quietly changed the way it distributes tasks from Ruby on Rails apps across the Amazon EC2 machines it makes available to its users at some point in the last few years without alerting developers of this change.”

Heroku’s general manager Oren Teich admitted to the issue.  Developers are upset that they were not advised of the change.

Indeed, the core issue is that, instead of intelligently routing requests to the next available server, as the PaaS did in the past, Heroku now seems to distribute requests randomly, which increases queuing times, which hurts performance.

One of the downsides of cloud computing is that you’re dependent upon others to manage the platform for you.  Changes in architecture and approaches, such as the issues with Heroku, will, indeed, impact the service.  In many instances, they are not contractually required to alert users, thus we need to be diligent around spotting changes in service levels.