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Azure Websites vs Cloud Foundry vs Heroku: What are the differences?
- Scalability: Azure Websites offer automatic scaling based on the traffic load, with the ability to manually adjust the instance count. Cloud Foundry automatically scales based on specific metrics set by the developer, while Heroku provides a simple slider to scale the number of dynos up or down.
- Pricing Model: Azure Websites charges based on the instance size and number of instances, while Cloud Foundry offers pay-as-you-go pricing with no upfront costs. Heroku also has a pay-as-you-go model, but charges for additional add-ons and services.
- Deployment Flexibility: Azure Websites support deployment through Git, FTP, or even integration with CI/CD tools like Azure DevOps. Cloud Foundry allows deployments through a CLI or a web interface, while Heroku focuses on Git-based deployments.
- Containerization: Azure Websites can run on Docker containers or directly on the platform, offering more flexibility. Cloud Foundry is built on containers by default, while Heroku runs applications in lightweight Linux containers called dynos.
- Integration Ecosystem: Azure Websites integrate seamlessly with other Azure services like databases, storage, and monitoring tools. Cloud Foundry provides its own marketplace of services for integration, and Heroku also offers a wide range of add-ons for different functionalities.
- Customization: Azure Websites allow for more customization in terms of environment variables, app settings, and scaling options. Cloud Foundry has a more opinionated approach to app deployment, while Heroku provides a balance of flexibility and convenience in customization.
In Summary, Azure Websites, Cloud Foundry, and Heroku differ in their scalability options, pricing models, deployment flexibility, containerization support, integration ecosystems, and customization levels.
The Friendliest.app started on Heroku (both app and db) like most of my projects. The db on Heroku was on the cusp of becoming prohibitively expensive for this project.
After looking at options and reading recommendations we settled on Render to host both the application and db. Render's pricing model seems to scale more linearly with the application instead of the large pricing/performance jumps experienced with Heroku.
Migration to Render was extremely easy and we were able to complete both the db and application moves within 24 hours.
The only thing we're really missing on Render is a CLI. With Heroku, we could manage everything from the command line in VSCode. With Render, you need to use the web shell they provide.
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.
Pros of Azure Websites
- Ease of deployment17
- Free plans for students6
Pros of Cloud Foundry
- Perfectly aligned with springboot2
- Free distributed tracing (zipkin)1
- Application health management1
- Free service discovery (Eureka)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 Azure Websites
Cons of Cloud Foundry
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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