Top 5 Reasons to Migrate Applications from Heroku to AWS
Cloud Computing has become immensely popular in the current technological era. It has acted as a significant factor in influencing the storage landscape in the past few years. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure are prominent and widely used public cloud providers offering highly-scalable, flexible, and reliable architectures. They have reshaped the storage market and are becoming an elemental part of the storage strategies of businesses. IT trends like the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Deep Learning have resulted in a growing amount of structured and unstructured data.
Cloud Computing has now become a fundamental requirement for most enterprises. 81% of the companies have adopted and work on multi-platform strategy. This number is still on the rise year by year, and the growth has been sudden over the last few years. While it’s believed broadly that the future of storage is multi-cloud, enterprises are still looking forward to continuing with local storage systems to manage file-handling, backup, and archive strategies.
Heroku Pros and Cons:
Heroku is a platform with a powerful ecosystem providing cloud-based services whose popularity has grown very much in recent years. It is an easy to use tool preferred for many development projects. It facilitates simple software development and deployment with the specific purpose of supporting customer-focused apps. Heroku platform controls servers and hardware, and every app built on Heroku is deployed to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Let us dive into the merits and loopholes of Heroku:
Heroku Pros:
- Heroku provides environment configuration, application deployment, and management that extremely easy to perform.
- It offers excellent standard metrics for detecting and diagnosing high-level issues.
- It acts as an exquisite tool for beginners as it is efficient.
- Heroku CLI grants a fantastic interface to interact with the cloud environment.
- It requires less maintenance and provides extensive documentation support.
Heroku Cons:
- Heroku does not offer static IP addresses. For some specific cases of sensitive data, Heroku becomes prohibitive.
- It does not incorporate the feature of creating SSH onto a server, extracting log files, and monitoring the system’s performance.
- Heroku restricts some users to view environment variables.
AWS Pros and Cons:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most extensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. This platform offers over 175 fully-featured services globally from the data centers. Millions of customers whether, big enterprises, startups, and governments are using AWS to become more agile, decrease costs, and innovate faster.
Below given are the advantages and disadvantages of AWS:
AWS Pros:
- AWS platform is clean and easy to use because of its management console and well-documented web services.
- AWS does not have any limit on its capacity. It offers the capacity at a minimum cost, thereby reducing the workload.
- It enables tools to provide speed and agility to access the applications as per your need.
- It offers a secured environment with reliability, scalability at a lower cost.
AWS Cons:
- Amazon EC2 provides limited information on the resources varying from region to region.
- There are some limitations to the security feature that remain unaltered, like, up to 100 groups per VPC.
- AWS charges for immediate support where you can choose among three packages – Developer, Business, Enterprise.
- AWS experiences some general cloud issues like limited control, downtime, and backup protection.
Market Statistics of AWS and Heroku
AWS is one of the topmost cloud providers across the world today. Here is the described market statistics of AWS and Heroku for the past few years. AWS revenue has grown 29% higher in the quarter, from $8.9 billion for Q3 2019 to $11.6 billion for Q3 2020. Amazon’s quarterly sales have hiked up to $96.1 billion, which is up to 37%, regardless of the beating predictions of $92.7 billion. The net income of $6.3 billion, the highest in a single quarter was driven by online shopping during COVID-19. AWS constitutes 12.1% of Amazon’s revenue for the quarter that is 57% of its operating income.

Heroku is used as a web hosting service provider by 0.1% of the entire group of websites. The market share of Heroku constitutes 11.88% out of the entire market share of cloud providers. 14,011 companies across the world use Heroku, out of which most companies are in the United States. 10-50 employee companies use Heroku, generating 1M-10M dollars in revenue. Some of the top competitors of Heroku are Firebase, Google App Engine, and Netlify.
5 Key Difference why AWS is more beneficial for your business compared to Heroku
Let’s talk about the points regarding AWS carrying more weightage and priority for your business in comparison to Heroku:

- AWS supports a mature ecosystem for tools, services, and apps for businesses to use.
- Unlike Heroku, AWS enables the development of heavy-computing projects and is ideal for all scales of enterprises, small, medium, or large.
- AWS is comparatively cheaper than Heroku, as Heroku proves to be expensive for large and high-traffic applications.
- Heroku is a PaaS platform and offers a limited range of databases, languages, and environments to work.
- AWS is much more flexible with respect to data storage features because it has in-built readily available solutions to accommodate whatever data store is applied.
Final Thoughts
We can conclude from the blog that Heroku and AWS both are amazing cloud-based solutions, but suited subtly for different areas. It is dependent on your preferences, whether you would like to go for AWS or Heroku. You need to understand and prioritize the features as per the needs and requirements of your organization. Next, you should analyze your budget and also determine whether your team possess enough expertise. Because, in the end, the appropriate platform is one that assists you to establish goals, keeping the developers productive simultaneously.
The good thing is that you can always switch between AWS or Heroku in case you alter the hosting plan or you want to incorporate a custom infrastructure for your app.