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Heroku

Build, deliver, monitor and scale web apps and APIs with a trail blazing developer experience.
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What is Heroku?

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.
Heroku is a tool in the Platform as a Service category of a tech stack.

Who uses Heroku?

Companies
2318 companies reportedly use Heroku in their tech stacks, including StackShare, Accenture, and Product Hunt.

Developers
22125 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Heroku.

Heroku Integrations

Slack, Travis CI, Terraform, New Relic, and Sentry are some of the popular tools that integrate with Heroku. Here's a list of all 157 tools that integrate with Heroku.
Pros of Heroku
703
Easy deployment
459
Free for side projects
374
Huge time-saver
348
Simple scaling
261
Low devops skills required
190
Easy setup
174
Add-ons for almost everything
153
Beginner friendly
150
Better for startups
133
Low learning curve
48
Postgres hosting
41
Easy to add collaborators
30
Faster development
24
Awesome documentation
19
Simple rollback
19
Focus on product, not deployment
15
Natural companion for rails development
15
Easy integration
12
Great customer support
8
GitHub integration
6
Painless & well documented
6
No-ops
4
I love that they make it free to launch a side project
4
Free
3
Great UI
3
Just works
2
PostgreSQL forking and following
2
MySQL extension
1
Security
1
Able to host stuff good like Discord Bot
0
Sec
Decisions about Heroku

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Heroku in their tech stack.

Shared insights

Most of our apps and services start life on heroku before moving upstream to AWS. Heroku

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Emanuel Evans
Senior Architect at Rainforest QA · | 20 upvotes · 1.5M views

We recently moved our main applications from Heroku to Kubernetes . The 3 main driving factors behind the switch were scalability (database size limits), security (the inability to set up PostgreSQL instances in private networks), and costs (GCP is cheaper for raw computing resources).

We prefer using managed services, so we are using Google Kubernetes Engine with Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL for our PostgreSQL databases and Google Cloud Memorystore for Redis . For our CI/CD pipeline, we are using CircleCI and Google Cloud Build to deploy applications managed with Helm . The new infrastructure is managed with Terraform .

Read the blog post to go more in depth.

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Priit Kaasik
Engineering Lead at Katana MRP · | 8 upvotes · 345.6K views
Shared insights
at

We undertook the task of building a manufacturing ERP for small branded manufacturers. We needed to build a lot, fast with a small team, and have clear focus on product delivery. We chose JavaScript / Node.js ( React + LoopBack full stack) , Heroku and Heroku Postgres (also Heroku Redis ) . This decision has guided us to picking other key technologies. It has granted us high pace of product delivery and service availability while operating with a small team.

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Anders Sveen
Lead Developer at ZTL Payments · | 4 upvotes · 45.6K views
Shared insights

We use Heroku because it's easy and fast. We spend 0 time on DevOps stuff (and I've spent a lot of time on that before), and it just keeps running. One click install of add-ons, and consolidated sign on with billing is awesome.

If you're going to use a lot of memory or run many processes it gets expensive fast. But you probably shouldn't use that much memory and you rarely need to run many processes. Heroku will start a new process if one dies (rare), so if you need extreme up time you can pay for running multiples. :)

Their support is stellar even though we don't pay for top tier support. Since we're off timezone wise it might take some time to get responses. But they always connect me to someone with deep technical insights that give concrete feedback and helpful information even when my problems are of the less common ones.

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Russel Werner
Lead Engineer at StackShare · | 7 upvotes · 493K views

We began our hosting journey, as many do, on Heroku because they make it easy to deploy your application and automate some of the routine tasks associated with deployments, etc. However, as our team grew and our product matured, our needs have outgrown Heroku. I will dive into the history and reasons for this in a future blog post.

We decided to migrate our infrastructure to Kubernetes running on Amazon EKS. Although Google Kubernetes Engine has a slightly more mature Kubernetes offering and is more user-friendly; we decided to go with EKS because we already using other AWS services (including a previous migration from Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS). We are still in the process of moving our main website workloads to EKS, however we have successfully migrate all our staging and testing PR apps to run in a staging cluster. We developed a Slack chatops application (also running in the cluster) which automates all the common tasks of spinning up and managing a production-like cluster for a pull request. This allows our engineering team to iterate quickly and safely test code in a full production environment. Helm plays a central role when deploying our staging apps into the cluster. We use CircleCI to build docker containers for each PR push, which are then published to Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECR). An upgrade-operator process watches the ECR repository for new containers and then uses Helm to rollout updates to the staging environments. All this happens automatically and makes it really easy for developers to get code onto servers quickly. The immutable and isolated nature of our staging environments means that we can do anything we want in that environment and quickly re-create or restore the environment to start over.

The next step in our journey is to migrate our production workloads to an EKS cluster and build out the CD workflows to get our containers promoted to that cluster after our QA testing is complete in our staging environments.

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Priit Kaasik
Engineering Lead at Katana MRP · | 8 upvotes · 327K views
Shared insights
at

Sometimes #ad-blocking addons can cause a real headache when working with JavaScript apps. Onboarding assistants (Appcues + elevio ), chat (Intercom) and product usage insight (Hotjar) have all landed on their blacklists. I guess there is a perfectly good reason for this that I just don't know.

In order to fix this, we had to set up our own content delivery service. We chose Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 to do the job because it has a good synergy with Heroku PaaS we are already using.

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Blog Posts

Sep 29 2020 at 7:36PM

WorkOS

PythonSlackG Suite+17
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GitHubPythonNode.js+47
54
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GitHubPythonSlack+25
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Jun 19 2015 at 6:37AM

ReadMe.io

JavaScriptGitHubNode.js+25
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GitHubPythonDocker+24
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Heroku's Features

  • Agile deployment for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, Go and Scala.
  • Run and scale any type of app.
  • Total visibility across your entire app.
  • Erosion-resistant architecture. Rich control surfaces.

Heroku Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Heroku?
DigitalOcean
We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.
Google App Engine
Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.
Firebase
Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.
Docker
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
Microsoft Azure
Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.
See all alternatives

Heroku's Followers
20109 developers follow Heroku to keep up with related blogs and decisions.