Heroku vs AWS: The Difference

Introduction

Heroku vs AWS is two cloud service providers. Heroku lets customers choose the server and host the application in their cloud. There are only two countries supported by Heroku. They are in the United States and Europe, while AWS provides lots of options to host their application in their cloud, such as elastic compute cloud, elastic Kubernetes service, elastic container service, and lambda. Currently, there are 37 regions supported by AWS.

What is AWS?

AWS is the pioneer in the cloud industry. Customers can choose from a variety of deployment options based on their application’s size and requirements. From startups to enterprises, customers consider AWS flexible and easy to use. It supports various domains in modern cloud computing. The few domains are network (VPC, Direct Connect, Firewall, etc), Compute (EC2, RDS, ECS, Lambda, etc ), storage (S3, Storage Gateway, Snowball, Snowtruck, etc), data analytics (Athena, Glue, EMR) and monitoring (Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail, and Grafana, etc). They also provide support for a seamless notification service. They are SQS (Simple Queue Service), SNS (Simple Notification Service), and SES (Simple Email Service). AWS is the hub of services that will meet all the customer needs from the data center, operational cost management, etc.

EC2

• EC2 is abbreviated as Elastic Compute Cloud. It is a virtual server available in an AWS-managed data center. AWS lets customers choose the size of the server.

• AWS EC2 offers nearly 100 instance sizes for all types of customer workloads.

• Additionally, changes between instance types and scaling the instance can be done easily by using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or AWS API Call

• Customers can deploy an application, database, or web server in the EC2 instance.

ECS

• ECS is abbreviated as Elastic Container Service.
• Here, the customer application is deployed in the EC2 instance container. They have the option to choose whether they can use a Linux-based EC2 instance or a Windows-based EC2 instance.
• The EC2 instance container is an EC2 instance with Docker installed and a developer specifically supporting a customer with a Docker environment requirement.

S3

• S3 is abbreviated as Simple Storage service
• It will help customer to store their data and utilize it in their application.
• It is also used as a source for data analysis.
• The S3 Archive tier helps customer to archive their data.

RDS

• RDS is abbreviated as Relational Database Service
• Customers who are using a relational database such as MSSQL, MYSQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle SQL can use Amazon RDS.
• Amazon RDS is optimized to run those engines and provide better performance
• customer can also have features like Backup, Autoscaling, etc

Pros and Cons

Pros

• AWS is offering Infrastructure as a service, Platform as a service, and software as a service to customers globally.
• AWS meet various kind of customer demands from low computational need to high computational resources
• The customer is responsible for data available in the computing infrastructure. AWS won't have access to customer data.
• AWS provides all sorts of complaint standards to meet regulatory compliance. So a customer who opts for AWS can easily meet compliance requirements such as HIPAA, PSI DSS, etc.

Cons

• Working towards AWS technologies required intermediate- expert level knowledge.
• Managing and operating costs for the infrastructure incur high costs over the long term.
• Big Enterprise infrastructure architecture in AWS is often complex to understand and troubleshoot.

What is Heroku?

Heroku was founded in 2007. Their initial business model is to host the customer application on the cloud. In the initial stage, it supports only applications that use Ruby on Rails as a programming language. Later, they began to support a variety of programming languages, including Python, PHP, Go, Scala, Clojure, Node.js, and Java. In the year 2012, Salesforce acquired Heroku and reframed its business model as a platform as a service (PaaS) with additional features such as scalable hosting, a developer-centric ecosystem, and ease of use.

1 . Heroku Platform

Heroku DX

• Heroku DX provides a centralized UI experience for developers to check application metrics.
• It also provides features to scale the application up and down using the UI.

Heroku OpEx

• Heroku OpEX is a monitoring service that will monitor the Heroku application for request failures, resource utilization, and so on.
• Customers can create runtime metrics or use default metrics to monitor their applications.

Heroku Runtime

• Heroku Runtime is the lightweight and optimized Linux environment (Dynos) used for hosting the applications of customers.
• In addition to hosting, it manages the routing, networking, and SSL configuration.

2. Heroku Data Services

Heroku Postgres

• Heroku Postgres is a managed open-source version of Postgres with optimized performance to provide developers and database administrators with a better experience.
• Heroku Postgres Database is available with 4 GB of RAM and up to 768 GB of RAM.

Heroku Data for Redis

• Redis is a key value data store. It is used by most companies around the world in their data-cycle pipelines.
• Heroku Data for Redis is the managed Redis instance. It is optimized for faster results and better performance.
• Heroku will take care of the configuration setup and manage it for customers.
• It will provide data insight much faster than another service provider

Apache Kafka on Heroku

• Apache Kafka is an open-source and distributed event-streaming and processing platform.
• Apache Kafka on Heroku is managed by the Apache Kafka service. It provides the following benefits.

  • Easy developer experience

  • Capable of managing different-sized events

  • Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)

  • Seamless integration with other apps

  • Event streams can be accessed on Amazon (via a private link) and Heroku.

  • Streaming Data Connectors

3 . Heroku Enterprise

Heroku Private Spaces

• Heroku private spaces are part of the Heroku enterprise. Here, the app and data services deployed will have an isolated network compartment and dedicated runtime environment
• This helps customers connect more securely to the Heroku application from their on-premise corporate network or any other cloud service provider.

Heroku Connect

• Heroku Connect provides seamless data synchronization between Heroku and Salesforce.
• If the customer is deploying Salesforce, they can take advantage of the bidirectional synchronization between Salesforce and the Heroku Postgres database.

Heroku Shield

• Complaint regulation was required for certain businesses and industries. Heroku Shield is available to customers who require HIPAA or PCI* compliance.

• It helps customers achieve compliance-regulated applications on the Heroku servers.

4. Heroku Teams

• Heroku Teams provides a centralized solution for workflow for the customer application. Using Heroku teams, Heroku admins can assign roles to team members for faster collaboration and delegated administration.

Pros and Cons

Heroku's development has progressed over time. Today, they have lots of offerings within the scope of application hosting. They developed lots of products to support their case, and the products will help developers monitor and troubleshoot quickly.

Pros

• Heroku is the best platform for developers to learn and do hands-on about hosting and web application deployment. It provides easy integration with GitHub and let developers host their application from their Local machine with predefined git and Heroku commands
• Customers don’t require any operational maintenance of their infrastructure, Heroku will do that for them
• The average running cost for the Heroku server is $0.50 per hour
• Heroku is best suited for startups and small to medium scaled businesses.

Cons

• Since Heroku serves in the united states and Europe, companies that reside apart from these two require additional regulatory requirements to use Heroku.
• Heroku offers a few products and supports only. It does not support ios based projects since ios applications run only on mac instances.

Heroku vs AWS: Comparison Chart

Heroku vs AWS: Key Differences