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Amazon EC2 vs Heroku: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Amazon EC2 and Heroku. While both are popular cloud computing platforms, they have distinct features and use cases that make them suitable for different purposes. Let's explore their differences in detail.
Scalability: One major difference between Amazon EC2 and Heroku is their approach to scalability. Amazon EC2 provides more control and flexibility, allowing users to scale their infrastructure up or down based on their specific needs. On the other hand, Heroku abstracts the infrastructure layer and provides an easy-to-use platform for deploying web applications, handling scaling automatically based on the workload.
Pricing Model: Another significant difference lies in their pricing models. Amazon EC2 follows a pay-as-you-go model, where users are charged based on the usage of resources like CPU, RAM, and storage. This gives users more granular control over costs but may require more management effort for cost optimization. Heroku, on the other hand, follows a more simplified pricing model, offering pre-defined plans based on the resources required. This can be advantageous for smaller projects or teams with limited budget and technical expertise.
Deployment Flexibility: When it comes to deployment options, Amazon EC2 offers a wide range of choices, supporting various operating systems and allowing users to customize their server and software stack. Heroku, on the other hand, is optimized for quick and easy deployments, mainly focusing on web applications built with popular languages like Ruby, Node.js, and Python. Heroku's simplified deployment process makes it an attractive choice for developers looking for rapid application development and deployment.
Management and Administration: Amazon EC2 requires more manual management and administration compared to Heroku. With EC2, users have full control over the servers and are responsible for tasks like provisioning, monitoring, and scaling. In contrast, Heroku abstracts away much of the infrastructure management, handling tasks like scaling, monitoring, and disaster recovery automatically. This can be beneficial for developers who want to focus more on application development without worrying about server management.
Integration with AWS Services: As part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem, Amazon EC2 seamlessly integrates with other AWS services like S3 for storage, RDS for databases, and CloudWatch for monitoring. This allows users to build complex and scalable applications by leveraging the full range of AWS services. While Heroku is also built on AWS infrastructure, it has a more limited set of integrations compared to EC2.
Customization and Control: To cater to a wide range of use cases, Amazon EC2 provides users with extensive customization and control options. Users can choose the instance types, storage options, and networking configurations based on their specific requirements. Heroku, being a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, abstracts much of the underlying infrastructure, limiting customization options. This trade-off between customization and ease of use is a crucial factor to consider when choosing between the two platforms.
In Summary, Amazon EC2 offers more scalability, pricing flexibility, deployment options, and customization control, but requires more manual management, whereas Heroku provides easier deployment, automatic scaling, simplified pricing, and seamless integration with AWS services, making it suitable for rapid development and smaller projects. Consider your specific needs and technical expertise when choosing between Amazon EC2 and Heroku.
I'm transitioning to Render from heroku. The pricing scale matches my usage scale, yet it's just as easy to deploy. It's removed a lot of the devops that I don't like to deal with on setting up my own raw *nix box and makes deployment simple and easy!
Clustering I don't use clustering features at the moment but when i need to set up clustering of nodes and discoverability, render will enable that where Heroku would require that I use an external service like redis.
Restarts The restarts are annoying. I understand the reasoning, but I'd rather watch my service if its got a memory leak and work to fix it than to just assume that it has memory leaks and needs to restart.
I host my stuff with Hetzner in large part because their tools are straighforward and easy to use and they're based in a country whose laws respect privacy.
If you're hosting with a company that's US-based, you have to worry about their laws affecting your site, which isn't an acceptable requirement in my opinion.
DigitalOcean was where I began; its USD5/month is extremely competitive and the overall experience as highly user-friendly.
However, their offerings were lacking and integrating with other resources I had on AWS was getting more costly (due to transfer costs on AWS). Eventually I moved the entire project off DO's Droplets and onto AWS's EC2.
One may initially find the cost (w/o free tier) and interface of AWS daunting however with good planning you can achieve highly cost-efficient systems with savings plans, spot instances, etcetera.
Do not dive into AWS head-first! Seriously, don't. Stand back and read pricing documentation thoroughly. You can, not to the fault of AWS, easily go way overbudget. Your first action upon getting your AWS account should be to set up billing alarms for estimated and current bill totals.
We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.
GCE is much more user friendly than EC2, though Amazon has come a very long way since the early days (pre-2010's). This can be seen in how easy it is to edit the storage attached to an instance in GCE: it's under the instance details and is edited inline. In AWS you have to click the instance > click the storage block device (new screen) > click the edit option (new modal) > resize the volume > confirm (new model) then wait a very long time. Google's is nearly instant.
- In both cases, the instance much be shut down.
There also the preference between "user burden-of-security" and automatic security: AWS goes for the former, GCE the latter.
Most bioinformatics shops nowadays are hosting on AWS or Azure, since they have HIPAA tiers and offer enterprise SLA contracts. Meanwhile Heroku hasn't historically supported HIPAA. Rackspace and Google Cloud would be other hosting providers we would consider, but we just don't get requests for them. So, we mostly focus on AWS and Azure support.
Pros of Amazon EC2
- Quick and reliable cloud servers647
- Scalability515
- Easy management393
- Low cost277
- Auto-scaling271
- Market leader89
- Backed by amazon80
- Reliable79
- Free tier67
- Easy management, scalability58
- Flexible13
- Easy to Start10
- Widely used9
- Web-scale9
- Elastic9
- Node.js API7
- Industry Standard5
- Lots of configuration options4
- GPU instances2
- Simpler to understand and learn1
- Extremely simple to use1
- Amazing for individuals1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
Pros of Heroku
- Easy deployment703
- Free for side projects459
- Huge time-saver374
- Simple scaling348
- Low devops skills required261
- Easy setup190
- Add-ons for almost everything174
- Beginner friendly153
- Better for startups150
- Low learning curve133
- Postgres hosting48
- Easy to add collaborators41
- Faster development30
- Awesome documentation24
- Simple rollback19
- Focus on product, not deployment19
- Natural companion for rails development15
- Easy integration15
- Great customer support12
- GitHub integration8
- Painless & well documented6
- No-ops6
- I love that they make it free to launch a side project4
- Free4
- Great UI3
- Just works3
- PostgreSQL forking and following2
- MySQL extension2
- Security1
- Able to host stuff good like Discord Bot1
- Sec0
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Cons of Amazon EC2
- Ui could use a lot of work14
- High learning curve when compared to PaaS6
- Extremely poor CPU performance3
Cons of Heroku
- Super expensive27
- Not a whole lot of flexibility9
- No usable MySQL option7
- Storage7
- Low performance on free tier5
- 24/7 support is $1,000 per month2
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