Heroku or Amazon Web Services – Which is Best for Your Startup?

Author: Ievgen Cherkashyn

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Heroku are two commonly used cloud services that let us deploy, monitor, and scale web and mobile applications. Both services provide us with cloud computing resources and are great for hosting applications. But if you’re building your first mobile or web application, how can you decide which of these options – Heroku or AWS

  • is best for your application?

Choosing a hosting service becomes even harder when we take a glance at the number of products AWS offers. It’s easy to get lost.

AWS provides a wide variety of products, making it difficult to quickly choose the right solution for your needs. And we haven’t even started considering Heroku!

Let’s dive into the features of AWS and Heroku – and consider the key solutions they offer – to figure out your best option!

Heroku vs Amazon Web Services for Startups

What are Heroku and AWS?

If we search for a comparison of Heroku and AWS, we’ll see a bunch of articles that juxtapose AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with Heroku. But comparing EC2 and Heroku isn’t very logical for several reasons, as we’ll explain shortly.

AWS Elastic Compute Cloud

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is an Infrastructure as a Service product, and is Amazon’s flagship AWS offering. Before we’re able to deploy an application on Elastic Compute Cloud, we have to develop server infrastructure that will suit our application.

But what does that look like? Put simply, we’ll need to manually configure and maintain virtualized servers that run our application. We also add database instances; choose and set up an operating system; and set up a load balancer to spread the load across multiple application servers. On top of that, we must select a CPU and amounts of RAM and storage that satisfy our application’s need. We’ll also install backup servers and hook them up to the main servers.

AWS Elastic Compute Cloud provides us only with the building blocks. Our task is to select the best blocks for our application and actively manage them, not only set them up. At RubyGarage, our dedicated DevOps engineer is responsible for provisioning EC2 instances, controlling application deployment, and orchestrating EC2 infrastructure (deciding how these ‘building blocks’ interact with each other).

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