{"id":5304,"date":"2021-03-04T13:51:11","date_gmt":"2021-03-04T13:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techuz.com\/blog\/?p=5304"},"modified":"2024-03-21T05:10:20","modified_gmt":"2024-03-21T05:10:20","slug":"heroku-vs-aws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.techuz.com\/blog\/heroku-vs-aws\/","title":{"rendered":"Heroku vs AWS: Selecting the Right Cloud Service for Your Application"},"content":{"rendered":"

AWS and Heroku \u2014 two of the most popular and pioneering cloud service providers. While the former is known as the industry leader covering 32% of the market<\/a>, the latter brags a specific user base including startups and industry giants.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And while choosing the cloud provider out of the two you might have wondered: Which one,\u00a0<\/span>AWS or Heroku,<\/span><\/i> is suitable for your application and deployment needs? Which one can give some serious bang for the buck? Which one might give a better edge?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Or are these two cloud services <\/span>even comparable?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Well, just to answer your questions, we’ve done the dirty work of comparing these two providers. Here\u2019s everything you need to know about Heroku vs AWS.<\/span><\/p>
<\/br>

Heroku vs AWS: Overview\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n

Heroku<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

\"Heroku\"<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with Heroku, one of the first cloud PaaS providers since 2007 that\u2019s enabling<\/span> super simple <\/span><\/i>deployment, monitoring, and scaling apps. Or to say in the own words of Heroku \u201c…it’s the fastest way to go from idea to URL\u201d.<\/em>\u00a0 Now that statement is more than just romanticizing its value proposition because it exactly does what it says.<\/span><\/p>\n

Heroku is a PaaS (platform as a service ) provider that officers a ready-made environment for a hassle-free infrastructure setup. It equips you with a ready-made runtime environment, application servers, pre-installed operating systems, and every infrastructure without actually having to deal with it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It works like a ready-to-move condo for your app with every amenity \u2014 without bothering to build or set up anything.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And if you think that\u2019s not enough, let me tell you about the\u00a0 175+ add-ons ranging from databases, messaging services to mail delivery \u2014 all with seamless integration for all the application needs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This makes Heroku great for small teams and startups who don’t want to bother about infrastructure management. However,\u00a0it works equally well with huge teams and enterprises. Thanks to the ease of collaboration, resource sharing, access control, and flexible scaling to support the enterprise needs.<\/span><\/p>
<\/br>

AWS\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n

\"AWS\"<\/p>\n

Now, talking about AWS<\/a> requires putting more flesh to the bone because, unlike Heroku, it is more than a PaaS provider.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Amazon Web Service (AWS) is a set of over 200 fully-featured cloud computing services. If you take a look at their massive offerings on the website, you\u2019ll realize a scroll without the categorization would be never-ending.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While Heroku just deals with providing a platform as a service to deploy and manage apps, AWS plethora of services \u2014 computing, databases, networking & CDN, storage, developer tools, products for IoT, machine learning, game tech, and even\u00a0<\/span>Ground Station as a Service to control satellites and ingest data.\u00a0 These are just a few from their product list.<\/p>\n

In fact, Heroku itself is built on top of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) which an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).\u00a0 And often EC2 is compared with Heroku while selecting the cloud provider. That’s illogical.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Remember, the analogy of a ready-to-move condo? While Heroku is a ready-to-move condo, EC2, an IaaS, is just like leasing land and building a house on it from scratch. An\u00a0<\/span>IaaS provides access to a cloud-based environment that requires you or the web development company<\/a> you hired to install and set-up each resource manually.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Therefore, to keep the Heroku vs AWS comparison fair we need the right contestant and that’s Elastic Beanstalk, a PaaS by Amazon.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>
<\/br>

Elastic BeanStalk\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS that allows you to create and deploy applications. It\u2019s an \u201c<\/span>easy-to-use\u201d cloud computing service<\/span> that makes deploying and managing applications pretty convenient.<\/span><\/p>\n

You just upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the rest \u2014 everything from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to health monitoring.\u00a0<\/span>So you don\u2019t need to bother about configuring the infrastructure as everything is automated. <\/span><\/p>\n

But at the same time, you do have the control to configure the infrastructure resources if needed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beanstalk uses the different AWS services \u2014 Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification Service(SNS), Amazon CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon EC2 which means at any point if you want to migrate from the beanstalk, that process would be seamless.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Heroku vs AWS: Popularity<\/b><\/h2>\n

Heroku has been in the market as a PaaS provider since 2007, four years before AWS introduced Elastic Beanstalk. And since then, it has been the preferred choice for easy app deployment and management.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

According to\u00a0data<\/a>, Heroku is highly popular among small businesses and startups with teams of up to 49 members and revenue between 1-10 million dollars. However, the PaaS platform is also used by some of the popular names including Verizon Wireless, Kajabi, Unsplash, Calendly,\u00a0 Reynolds & Reynolds, and SurveyMonkey.\"Heroku\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Amazon\u2019s PaaS is also fairly popular \u2014 although not as widely covering the market as its own EC2. AWS Elastic Beanstalk has a scattered user base among companies with different sizes\u2014 from small-medium teams to even those with over 10k employees and over a billion in revenue.\u00a0 Popular companies using Elastic Beanstalk include Accenture, COX, BMW, Samsung Business, and OYO.<\/span><\/p>\n

If we talk about the reviews and ratings, both Heroku and AWS scores fairly well. As per the user ratings on G2 Crowd Beanstalk scored 4.1 while Heroku is rated at 4.3, both with 89 ratings.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Heroku<\/span><\/h2>\n

Heroku vs AWS: Pricing<\/b><\/h2>\n

While both the services might have similar features, the way its pricing works can be a deciding factor.\u00a0 Check it out.<\/span><\/p>\n

Heroku<\/b><\/h3>\n

Heroku comes with a free plan and three different tires as per the application needs and uses cases. <\/span><\/p>\n

You can start with a free plan with a free dyno (Heroku’s server) in which you get 512 MB of RAM. Now that\u2019s too low, but you can add an additional 512 MB RAM dyno for just $7 per month. This might be pretty good just to get started with your POC and MVP<\/a> but once you generate some traffic, the application is bound to snap.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s when the commercial plan comes in \u2014 starting with the ‘Production’ plan with ‘Standard’ dyno costing $25-$50 per dyno per month.<\/span><\/p>\n

Till now the prices might not bother you much. But upgrade to the next tier for apps with complex functionality, high availability, high volume, and concurrent requests \u2014 that’s where large price jumps are seen. <\/span><\/p>\n

From $25-50 per dyno per month to $250-500 per dyno per month. And this continues with the database, in-memory data store, main storage, data streaming, and support.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a quick look at Heroku\u2019s pricing<\/span><\/p>\n

Cloud computing: Dyno<\/b><\/p>\n