Why do people use Heroku when AWS is present What distinguishes Heroku from AWS

Question

I m a beginner RoR programmer who s planning to deploy my app using Heroku  Word from my other advisor friends says that Heroku is really easy  good to use  The only problem is that I still have no idea what Heroku does     I ve looked at their website and in a nutshell  what Heroku does is help with scaling but    why does that even matter  How does Heroku help with    Speed - My research implied that deploying AWS on the US East Coast would be the fastest if I am targeting a US Asia-based audience  Security - How secure are they  Scaling - How does it actually work  Cost efficiency - There s something like a dyno that makes it easy to scale  How do they fare against their competitors  For example  Engine Yard and bluebox    Please use layman English terms to explain    I m a beginner programmer

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Heroku is like subset of AWS  It is just platform as a  service  while AWS can be implemented as anything and at any level   The implementation depends on what the business requirement  If it fits in either  use accordingly

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First things first  AWS and Heroku are different things  AWS offer Infrastructure as a Service  IaaS  whereas Heroku offer a Platform as a Service  PaaS    What s the difference  Very approximately  IaaS gives you components you need in order to build things on top of it  PaaS gives you an environment where you just push code and some basic configuration and get a running application  IaaS can give you more power and flexibility  at the cost of having to build and maintain more yourself   To get your code running on AWS and looking a bit like a Heroku deployment  you ll want some EC2 instances - you ll want a load balancer   caching layer installed on them  e g  Varnish   you ll want instances running something like Passenger and nginx to serve your code  you ll want to deploy and configure a clustered database instance of something like PostgreSQL  You ll want a deployment system with something like Capistrano  and something doing log aggregation    That s not an insignificant amount of work to set up and maintain  With Heroku  the effort required to get to that sort of stage is maybe a few lines of application code and a git push    So you re this far  and you want to scale up  Great  You re using Puppet for your EC2 deployment  right  So now you configure your Capistrano files to spin up down instances as needed  you re-jig your Puppet config so Varnish is aware of web-worker instances and will automatically pool between them  Or you heroku scale web  5   Hopefully that gives you an idea of the comparison between the two  Now to address your specific points   Speed  Currently Heroku only runs on AWS instances in us-east and eu-west  For you  this sounds like what you want anyway  For others  it s potentially more of a consideration   Security  I ve seen a lot of internally-maintained production servers that are way behind on security updates  or just generally poorly put together  With Heroku  you have someone else managing that sort of thing  which is either a blessing or a curse depending on how you look at it    When you deploy  you re effectively handing your code straight over to Heroku  This may be an issue for you  Their article on Dyno Isolation details their isolation technologies  it seems as though multiple dynos are run on individual EC2 instances   Several colleagues have expressed issues with these technologies and the strength of their isolation  I am alas not in a position of enough knowledge   experience to really comment  but my current Heroku deployments consider that  good enough   It may be an issue for you  I don t know   Scaling  I touched on how one might implement this in my IaaS vs PaaS comparison above  Approximately  your application has a Procfile  which has lines of the form dyno type  command to run  so for example  cribbed from http   devcenter heroku com articles process-model    web     bundle exec rails server worker  bundle exec rake jobs work   This  with a   heroku scale web 2 worker 10   will result in you having 2 web dynos and 10 worker dynos running  Nice  simple  easy  Note that web is a special dyno type  which has access to the outside world  and is behind their nice web traffic multiplexer  probably some sort of Varnish   nginx combination  that will route traffic accordingly  Your workers probably interact with a message queue for similar routing  from which they ll get the location via a URL in the environment   Cost Efficiency  Lots of people have lots of different opinions about this  Currently it s  0 05 hr for a dyno hour  compared to  0 025 hr for an AWS micro instance or  0 09 hr for an AWS small instance   Heroku s dyno documentation says you have about 512MB of RAM  so it s probably not too unreasonable to consider a dyno as a bit like an EC2 micro instance  Is it worth double the price  How much do you value your time  The amount of time and effort required to build on top of an IaaS offering to get it to this standard is definitely not cheap  I can t really answer this question for you  but don t underestimate the  hidden costs  of setup and maintenance    A bit of an aside  but if I connect to a dyno from here  heroku run bash   a cursory look shows 4 cores in  proc cpuinfo and 36GB of RAM - this leads me to believe that I m on a  High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance   The Heroku dyno documentation says each dyno receives 512MB of RAM  so I m potentially sharing with up to 71 other dynos   I don t have enough data about the homogeny of Heroku s AWS instances  so your milage may vary    How do they fare against their competitors   This  I m afraid I can t really help you with  The only competitor I ve ever really looked at was Google App Engine - at the time I was looking to deploy Java applications  and the amount of restrictions on usable frameworks and technologies was incredibly off-putting  This is more than  just a Java thing  - the amount of general restrictions and necessary considerations  the FAQ hints at several  seemed less than convenient  In contrast  deploying to Heroku has been a dream   Conclusion  I hope this answers your questions  please comment if there are gaps   other areas you d like addressed   I feel I should offer my personal position  I love Heroku for  quick deployments   When I m starting an application  and I want some cheap hosting  the Heroku free tier is awesome - essentially if you only need one web dyno and 5MB of PostgreSQL  it s free to host an application   Heroku is my go-to position  For  Serious Production Deployment  with several paying customers  with a service-level-agreement  with dedicated time to spend on ops  et cetera  I can t quite bring myself to offload that much control to Heroku  and then either AWS or our own servers have been the hosting platform of choice   Ultimately  it s about what works best for you  You say you re  a beginner programmer  - it might just be that using Heroku will let you focus on writing Ruby  and not have to spend time getting all the other infrastructure around your code built up  I d definitely give it a try     Note  AWS does actually have a PaaS offering  Elastic Beanstalk  that supports Ruby  Node js  PHP  Python   NET and Java  I think generally most people  when they see  AWS   jump to things like EC2 and S3 and EBS  which are definitely IaaS offerings

User · Answer

Actually you can use both - you can develop an app with amazon servers ec2  Then push it  with git  to heroku for free for awhile  use heroku free tier to serve it to the public  and test it like so  It is very cost effective in comparison to rent a server  but you  will have to talk with a more restrictive heroku api which is something you should think about  Source  this method was adopted for one of my online classes  Startup engineering from Coursera Stanford by Balaji S  Srinivasan and Vijay S  Pande

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There are a lot of different ways to look at this decision from development  IT  and business objectives  so don t feel bad if it seems overwhelming  But also - don t overthink scalability   Think about your requirements   I ve engineered websites which have serviced over 8M uniques a day and delivered terabytes of video a week built on infrastructures starting at  250k in capital hardware unr by a huge  MM IT labor staff   But I ve also had smaller websites which were designed to generate  10- 20k per year  didn t have very high traffic  db or processing requirements  and I ran those off a  10 mo generic hosting account without compromise   In the future  deployment will look more like Heroku than AWS  just because of progress  There is zero value in the IT knob-turning of scaling internet infrastructures which isn t increasingly automatable  and none of it has anything to do with the value of the product or service you are offering   Also  keep in mind with a commercial website - scalability is what we often call a  good problem to have  - although scalability issues with sites like Facebook and Twitter were very high-profile  they had zero negative effect on their success - the news might have even contributed to more signups  all press is good press    If you have a service which is generating a 100k  uniques a day and having scaling issues  I d be glad to take it off your hands for you no matter what the language  db  platform  or infrastructure you are running on   Scalability is a fixable implementation problem - not having customers is an existential issue

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Funny thing is Heroku actually uses AWS on the backend  It takes away all the overhead and does architecture management on EC2 for you   Got that knowledge from a senior engineer at a Big Company during an Interview

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It s been a significant percentage of our business migrating people from Heroku to AWS  There are advantages to both  but it s gets messy on Heroku after a while    once you need a certain level of complexity no longer easy to maintain with Heroku s limitations   That said  there are increasingly options to have the ease of Heroku and the flexibility of AWS by being on AWS with great frameworks tools

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Well  I observer Heroku is famous in budding and newly born developers while AWS has advanced developer persona  DigitalOcean is also a major player in this ground  Cloudways has made it much easy to create Lamp stack in a click on DigitalOcean and AWS  Having all services and packages updates in a click is far better than doing all thing manually    You can check out completely here  https   www cloudways com blog host-php-on-aws-cloud

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Even though both AWS and Heroku are cloud platforms  they are different as AWS is IaaS and Heroku  is  PaaS

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AWS   Heroku are both free for small hobby projects  to start with     If you want to start an app right away  without much customization of the architecture  then choose Heroku   If you want to focus on the architecture and to be able to use different web servers  then choose AWS  AWS is more time-consuming based on what service product you choose  but can be worth it  AWS also comes with many plugin services and products     Heroku   Platform as a Service  PAAS  Good documentation Has built-in tools and architecture  Limited control over architecture while designing the app  Deployment is taken care of  automatic via GitHub or manual via git commands or CLI   Not time consuming      AWS   Infrastructure as a Service  IAAS  Versatile - has many products such as EC2  LAMBDA  EMR  etc  Can use a Dedicated instance for more control over the architecture  such as choosing the OS  software version  etc  There is more than one backend layer  Elastic Beanstalk is a feature similar to Heroku s PAAS   Can use the automated deployment  or roll your own

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As Kristian Glass Said  there is no comparison between IaaS AWS  and PaaS Heroku  EngineYard     PaaS basically helps developers to speed the development of app thereby saving money and most importantly innovating their applications and business instead of setting up configurations and managing things like servers and databases  Other features buying to use PaaS is the application deployment process such as agility  High Availability  Monitoring  Scale   Descale  limited need for expertise  easy deployment  and reduced cost and development time    But still there is a dark side to PaaS which lead barrier to PaaS adoption      Less Control over Server and databases Costs will be very high if not governed properly Premature and dubious in current day and age   Apart from above you should have enough skill set to mange you IaaS    Hardware acquisition Operating System  Server Software  Server Side Scripting Environment Web server  Database Management System Mysql  Redis etc  Configure production server Tool for testing and deployment Monitoring App High Availability Load Blancing  Http Routing Service Backup Policies  Team Collaboration  Rebuild Production    If you have small scale business  PaaS will be best option for you    Pay as you Go Low start up cost Leave the plumbing to expert PaaS handles auto scaling descaling  Load balancing  disaster recovery PaaS manages all security requirements PaaS manages reliability  High Availability Paas manages many third party add-ons for you   It will be totally individual choice based on requirement  You can have details on my PPT Hosting Rails Apps

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The existing answers are broadly accurate    Heroku is very easy to use and deploy to  can be easily configured for auto-deployment a repository  eg GitHub   has lots of third party add-ons and charges more per instance  AWS has a wider range of competitively priced first party services including DNS  load balancing  cheap file storage and has enterprise features like being able to define security policies    For the tl dr skip to the end of this post   AWS ElasticBeanstalk is an attempt to provide a Heroku-like autoscaling and easy deployment platform  As it uses EC2 instances  which it creates automatically  EB servers can do everything any other EC2 instance can do and it s cheap to run    Deployment with EB is very slow  deploying an update can take 10-15 minutes per server and deploying to a larger cluster can take the best part of an hour - compared to just seconds to deploy an update on Heroku  Deployments on EB are not handled particularly seamlessly either  which may impose constraints on application design   You can use all the services ElasticBeanstalk uses behind the scenes to build your own bespoke system  with CodeDeploy  Elastic Load Balancer  Auto Scaling Groups - and CodeCommit  CodeBuild and CodePipeline if you want to go all in  but you can definitely spend a good couple of weeks setting it up the the first time as it s fairly convoluted and slightly tricker than just configuring things in EC2   AWS Lightsail offers a competitively priced hosting option  but doesn t help with deployment or scaling - it s really just a wrapper for their EC2 offering  but costs much more   It lets you automatically run a bash script on initial setup  which is nice touch but it s pricy compared to the cost of just setting up an EC2 instance  which you can also do programmatically    Some thoughts on comparing  to try and answer the questions  albeit in a roundabout way     Don t underestimate how much work system administration is  including keeping everything you have installed up to date with security patches  and occasional OS updates   Don t underestimate how much of a benefit automatic deployment  auto-scaling  and SSL provisioning and configuration are   Automatic deployment when you update your Git repository is effortless with Heroku  It is near instant  graceful so there are no outages for end users and can be set to update only if the tests   Continuous Integration passes so you don t break your site if you deploy broken code   You can also use ElasticBeanstalk for automatic deployment  but be prepared to spend a week setting that up the first time - you may have to change how you deploy and build assets  like CSS and JS  to work with how ElasticBeanstalk handles deployments or build logic into your app to handle deployments   Be aware in estimating costs that for seamless deployment with no outage on EB you need to run multiple instances - EB rolls out updates to each server individually so that your service is not degraded - where as Heroku spins up a new dyno for you and just deprecates the old service until all the requests to it are done being handled  then it deletes it    Interestingly  the hosting cost of running multiple servers with EB can be cheaper than a single Heroku instance  especially once you include the cost of add-ons    Some other issues not specifically asked about  but raised by other answers    Using a different provider for production and development is a bad idea   I am cringing that people are suggesting this  While ideally code should run just fine on any reasonable platform so it s as portable as possible  versions of software on each host will vary greatly and just because code runs in staging doesn t mean it will run in production  e g  major Node js Ruby Python PHP Perl versions can differ in ways that make code incompatible  often in silent ways that might not be caught even if you have decent test coverage    What is a good idea is to leverage something like Heroku for prototyping  smaller projects and microsites - so you can build and deploy things quickly without investing a lot of time in configuration and maintenance    Be sure to factor in the cost of running both production and pre-production instances when making that decision  not forgetting the cost of replicating the entire environment  including third party services such as data stores   add ons  installing and configuring SSL  etc   If using AWS  be wary of AWS pre-configured instances from vendors like Bitnami - they are a security nightmare  They can expose lots of notoriously vulnerable applications by default without mentioning it in the description    Consider instead just using a well supported mainstream distribution  such as Ubuntu or Debian  or CentOS if you need RPM support    Note  Amazon offer have their own distribution called Amazon Linux  which uses RPM  but it s EC2 specific and less well supported by third party open source software  You could also setup an EC2 instance on AWS  or Lightsail  and configure with something like flynn or dokku on it - on which you could then deploy multiple sites easily  which can be worth it if you maintain a lot of services or want to be able to spin up new things easily  However getting it set up is not as automagic as just using Heroku and you can end up spending a lot of time configuring and maintaining it  to the point I ve found deploying using Amazon clustering and Docker Swarm to be easier than setting them up  YMMV     I have used AWS EC instances  alone and in clusters   Elastic Beanstalk and Lightsail and Heroku at the same time depending on the needs of the project I m working on   I hate spending time configuring services but my Heroku bill would be thousands per year if I used it for everything and AWS works out a fraction of the cost   tl dr  If money was never an issue I d use Heroku for almost everything as it s a huge timesaver - but I d still want to use AWS for more complicated projects where I need the flexibility and more advanced services that Heroku doesn t offer   The ideal scenario for me would be if ElasticBeanstalk just worked more like Heroku - i e  with easier configuration and quicker and a better deployment mechanism   An example of a service that is almost this is now sh  which actually uses AWS behind the scenes  but makes deployments and clustering as easy as it is on Heroku  with automatic SSL  DNS  graceful deployments  super-easy cluster setup and management    I ve used it quite lot for both Node js app and Docker image deployments  the major caveat is the instances are shared  something reflected in their lower cost  and currently no option to buy dedicated instances  However their open source deployment tool  now  can also be used to deploy to dedicated instances on AWS as well as Google Cloud and Azure

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Sometimes  I wonder why people compare AWS to Heroku  AWS is an IAAS  infrastructure as a service  it clearly speaks how robust and calculative the system is   Heroku  on the other hand  is just a SAAS  it is basically just one fraction of AWS services  So why struggle with setting up AWS when you can ship your first product to the prime using Heroku   Heroku is free  simple and easy to deploy almost all types of stacks to the web  Heroku is specifically built to bypass all the hassles of shipping your application to a live server in less than no time    Nevertheless  you may want to deploy your application using any of the tutorials from both parties and compare  AWS DOCS and Heroku Docs

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Well  people usually ask this question  Heroku or AWS when starting to deploy something   My experiment of using both of Heroku  amp  AWS  here is my quick review and comparison   Heroku   One command to deploy whatever your project types  Ruby on Rails  Nodejs So many 1-click to integrate plugins  amp  third parties  It is super easy to start with something  Don t have auto-scaling  that means you need to scale up down manually Cost is expensive  especially  when system needs more resources Free instance available The free instance goes to sleep if it is inactive  Data center  US  amp  EU only CAN dive into access to machine level by using Heroku run bash  Thanks  MJafar Mash for the advice  but it is kind of limited  You don t have full access  Don t need to know too much about DevOps   AWS - EC2   This just like a machine with pre-config OS  or not   so you need to install software  library to make your website service go online  Plugin  amp  Library need to be integrated manually  or automation script  public script  amp  written by you  Auto scaling  amp  load balancer are the supported services  just learn how to config  amp  integrate to your system Cost is quite cheap  depends on which services and number of hours you use it There are several free hours for T2 micro instances  but usually  you will pay few dollars every month  if still using T2 micro  Your free instance won t go to sleep  available 24 7  because you may pay for it      Data center  around the world  Pick the region which is the best fit for you  Dive into machine level  So you can enjoy it Some knowledge about DevOps  but it is okay  Stackoverflow is helpful there    AWS Elastic Beanstalk an alternative of Heroku  but cheaper   Elastic Beanstalk was announced as a public beta from 2010  it helps we easier to work with deployment  For detail please go here Beanstalk is free  the cost you will pay will be for the services you use  amp  number of hours of usage  I use Elastic Beanstalk for a long time  and I think it can be the replacement of Heroku and cheaper    Summary   Heroku  Easy at beginning  FREE instance  but expensive later AWS     Not easy  free hours available  kind of cheaper  Beanstalk should be concerned to use   So in my current system  I use Heroku for staging and Beanstalk for production

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Amazon Web Services  AWS  offers lots of services from IaaS to PaaS with assured 99 9999999  durability and availability of data and infrastructure  AWS offers infrastructure automation along with several tools for developers to pipeline their application deployment process   On the other hand  Heroku is just PaaS which offers services to manage your platform on their cloud  It nowhere stands with AWS whether it is infrastructure or security

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Well Heroku uses AWS in background  it all depends on the type of solution you need  If you are a core linux and devops guy you are not worried about creating vm from scratch like selecting ami choosing palcement options etc  you can go with AWS  If you want to do things on surface level without having those nettigrities you can go with heroku

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