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AWS Elastic Load Balancing VS Heroku

Compare AWS Elastic Load Balancing VS Heroku and see what are their differences

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AWS Elastic Load Balancing logo AWS Elastic Load Balancing

Amazon ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud.

Heroku logo Heroku

Agile deployment platform for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, and Scala. Setup takes only minutes and deploys are instant through git. Leave tedious server maintenance to Heroku and focus on your code.
  • AWS Elastic Load Balancing Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-27
  • Heroku Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05

AWS Elastic Load Balancing features and specs

  • Scalability
    AWS Elastic Load Balancing can automatically distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, promoting application elasticity.
  • Health Monitoring
    It continually checks the health of the registered targets, ensuring that traffic is routed only to healthy instances.
  • Security
    Integrated with AWS's Certificate Manager and Application Load Balancer, allowing easy deployment of SSL/TLS for secure communication.
  • Flexibility
    Supports various types of load balancers: Application, Network, and Classic, each suited to different types of application architectures and requirements.
  • Cost-effective
    Pay-as-you-go pricing model ensures you only pay for the resources you use, which can lead to cost savings compared to a fixed-cost solution.
  • Integration
    Seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as Auto Scaling, Route 53, CloudWatch, and more for a more robust solution.

Possible disadvantages of AWS Elastic Load Balancing

  • Complexity
    Initial setup and configuration can be complex, especially for users unfamiliar with AWS services and cloud architecture.
  • Cost
    While the pay-as-you-go model is cost-effective, the charges can ramp up quickly, especially for high-traffic applications.
  • Dependence on AWS Ecosystem
    Highly integrated with AWS services, making it less ideal for multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments.
  • Latency
    In some cases, the load balancer can introduce a slight increase in latency, which might be a concern for latency-sensitive applications.
  • Configuration Limitations
    Some specific configurations and customizations may not be possible, leading to constraints on certain types of applications.

Heroku features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Heroku offers an extremely user-friendly interface and a high level of abstraction, making it easy for developers to deploy, manage, and scale applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
  • Quick Deployment
    One of Heroku’s strongest points is the ability to deploy applications quickly using Git. Developers can push their code to Heroku with a simple command, streamlining the entire process.
  • Scalability
    Heroku provides effortless scaling options by allowing developers to add more dynos (containers) with a single command to handle increased traffic and workload.
  • Add-Ons Ecosystem
    Heroku offers a rich ecosystem of add-ons, such as databases, caching, monitoring, and more, which can be easily integrated into applications to extend their functionality.
  • Automatic Updates
    Heroku automatically handles operating system and server updates, allowing developers to focus solely on their application code rather than maintenance tasks.
  • Free Tier
    Heroku offers a free tier with sufficient resources to host small projects and learn the platform without incurring costs, making it accessible for beginners and small-scale applications.

Possible disadvantages of Heroku

  • Cost
    While Heroku offers a free tier, the costs can quickly add up for larger applications and professional use. Paid plans and additional dynos or add-ons can become expensive.
  • Performance
    Heroku’s performance can sometimes be suboptimal compared to other cloud providers, particularly when running high-performance or resource-intensive applications.
  • Limited Control
    Heroku abstracts away a lot of infrastructure management, which can be a downside for developers who need fine-grained control over their environments and configurations.
  • Dyno Sleeping
    Applications running on Heroku’s free tier experience 'dyno sleeping,' where the application goes to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, causing a delay when it wakes up after receiving a new request.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Relying heavily on Heroku’s ecosystem and platform-specific features can lead to vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate to another platform if needed.
  • Add-On Costs
    The costs for add-ons can also become significant, as many useful features and integrations require paid add-ons, increasing the overall expense.

Analysis of AWS Elastic Load Balancing

Overall verdict

  • AWS Elastic Load Balancing is generally considered a good choice for managing traffic distribution in cloud-based applications. Its integration with other AWS services, reliability, and ability to handle varying workloads make it a strong contender for enterprises leveraging Amazon Web Services.

Why this product is good

  • AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is widely regarded as effective because it provides automated distribution of incoming application or network traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. This helps improve the availability and fault tolerance of applications. ELB supports dynamic scaling, which means it can automatically adjust to handle spikes in traffic. Additionally, it is integrated with AWS services, providing a seamless experience for users already within the AWS ecosystem.

Recommended for

    AWS Elastic Load Balancing is recommended for businesses and developers who are operating in the AWS ecosystem and require reliable load balancing solutions for their applications. It's especially beneficial for those needing to manage traffic across multiple applications and services, and for organizations looking for scalability and integration with AWS tools.

Analysis of Heroku

Overall verdict

  • Heroku is a solid choice for developers seeking a straightforward, cloud-based solution for deploying and managing applications. However, it may not be the most cost-effective option for large-scale or data-intensive applications.

Why this product is good

  • Heroku is a popular platform as a service (PaaS) due to its ease of use, fast deployment process, and robust support for multiple programming languages. It allows developers to focus on building applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Heroku offers scaling capabilities, a wide variety of add-ons, and a strong developer community.

Recommended for

    Heroku is recommended for startups, small to medium-sized applications, hobby projects, and developers who value ease of use and quick deployment cycles. It is particularly suited for those who are developing web applications in languages such as Ruby, Node.js, Python, and others supported by the platform.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing videos

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Heroku videos

What is Heroku | Ask a Dev Episode 14

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Category Popularity

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Web Servers
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Cloud Computing
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Web And Application Servers
Cloud Hosting
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare AWS Elastic Load Balancing and Heroku

AWS Elastic Load Balancing Reviews

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Heroku Reviews

  1. mark-mercer
    Useful Cloud Platform

    Great service to build, run and manage applications entirely in the cloud!

    🏁 Competitors: Amazon AWS, Dokku on Digital Ocean, Firebase
    👍 Pros:    Easy user interface|Good customer service|Multi-language cloud application platform
    👎 Cons:    Limitation with some addons|Low network performance
  2. jamestelford
    · Full Stack Developer at OutDev ·
    🏁 Competitors: Docker, Amazon AWS
    👍 Pros:    Powerful development environments|Great value for the money|Great customer support|Paas

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Heroku’s focus on simplicity and developer experience makes it a perfect fit for those who want to focus on building their apps, not babysitting servers. Startups and small businesses, in particular, can benefit from Heroku’s ability to accelerate development and deployment, allowing them to get their ideas to market faster.
Source: genezio.com
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Koyeb is a decent alternative to Heroku that you can consider for hosting or deploying your web apps and APIs. It has all the features of Heroku that you will need for your projects. So far, I have not encountered an importer tool for migrating Heroku deployments but I am sure doing that manually will not be that hard. Just like Heroku it offers you an intuitive web UI as...
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However, there are a few disadvantages to Heroku. First of all, despite its build pack, Heroku will run your project as a Node.js application. As a result, you will lose some of Next.js’ most interesting features, such as Incremental Static Regeneration. Analytics are replaced by metrics and measured throughput, response time, and memory usage (only on paid plans).
Top 10 Netlify Alternatives
Heroku is another alternative to Netlify that doesn’t only host static websites but has the ability to host dynamic websites. This PaaS platform was launched in 2007 and conferred highly scalable features to deploy, host and launch applications.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroku should be more popular than AWS Elastic Load Balancing. It has been mentiond 73 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing mentions (25)

  • Basic AWS Elastic Load Balancer Setup
    Load balancers can be categorized to different types depending on their use cases. On a broader classification, we can divide load balancers into three different categories based on how they are deployed. 1. Hardware load balancers - Dedicated physical appliances designed for high-performance traffic distribution. They are often used by large scale enterprises and data centers that require minimum latency and... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Work Stealing: Load-balancing for compute-heavy tasks
    When a backend starts or stops, something needs to update, whether it’s Consul, kube-proxy, ELB, or otherwise. To stop a worker without incurring failures, you need to prevent the load balancer from sending new requests and then finishing existing ones. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Load Balancers in AWS
    In this way, you can create a load balancer and custom rules using AWS Elastic Load Balancer. You can refer the official user guide to learn more about load balancing in AWS. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • A Ride Through Optimising Legacy Spring Boot Services For High Throughput
    Use load balancers and distribute load accordingly to your redundant spring boot services. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • DevSecOps with AWS- Ephemeral Environments – Creating test Environments On-Demand - Part 1
    • Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that helps you easily deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. • AWS Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers. AWS Fargate is compatible with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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Heroku mentions (73)

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What are some alternatives?

When comparing AWS Elastic Load Balancing and Heroku, you can also consider the following products

nginx - A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet.

DigitalOcean - Simplifying cloud hosting. Deploy an SSD cloud server in 55 seconds.

Traefik - Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

Linode - We make it simple to develop, deploy, and scale cloud infrastructure at the best price-to-performance ratio in the market.

Google Cloud Load Balancing - Google Cloud Load Balancer enables users to scale their applications on Google Compute Engine.

Amazon AWS - Amazon Web Services offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. Free to join, pay only for what you use.