Migrating from Heroku to AWS is a strategic decision for many growing companies seeking enhanced scalability, flexibility, and cost control. While new startups often appreciate Heroku for its simplicity, its limitations become apparent as your application scales.
You can migrate from Heroku to AWS using methods that can take 2 weeks or more to complete. We want to show you how you can to use a solution called Kapstan to migrate from Heroku to AWS in about 2 hours. Not only can engineers easily migrate to AWS with Kapstan, but they can deploy and scale applications in alignment with their company’s DevSecOps processes.
This guide will help you understand why companies outgrow Heroku, what Kapstan offers over Heroku, and provide steps for migrating from Heroku to AWS using Kapstan.
Why Companies Outgrow Heroku
Companies outgrow Heroku for reasons related to scalability, performance, cost, flexibility and vendor lock-in.
Here are the most common factors:
- Limited scalability: While Heroku does offer options for scaling, they may not be sufficient for applications with significant or highly variable traffic. AWS provides a more robust and flexible scaling infrastructure.
- Shared infrastructure: Heroku’s shared infrastructure can affect response times and reliability due to performance bottlenecks.
- High costs: As applications scale, the cost of using Heroku can become prohibitive due to large databases and high traffic volumes. Heroku’s pricing model may not be cost-effective compared to AWS which offers more granular cost control with reserved instances and spot pricing.
- Restricted configurations: Heroku’s simplified environment can limit the customizations you can make based on your application’s needs. Deploying on AWS via Kapstan allows developers to tailor infrastructure to specific needs.
- Vendor lock-in: Heroku’s proprietary environment can limit portability and interoperability with other platforms and services.
What Kapstan Offers Over Heroku
So why should you consider using Kapstan to migrate from Heroko to AWS? Kapstan provides a way to enjoy the managed experience of Heroku while giving you access to the best in public cloud.
Here are a few reasons to consider using Kapstan for migrating from Heroku to AWS.
- Self-hosting: Applications run in your own AWS instance, not Kapstan’s.
- Programming language: Kapstan uses containers for deployment with support for all programming languages.
- Application cost visibility: Kapstan tracks application costs per service, giving teams visibility to effectively manage cloud costs.
- Application performance monitoring: Kapstan comes with APM giving engineering teams real-time visibility into API latency, success rates, and request counts out-of-the-box.
- Microservices support: Kapstan supports containerization, orchestration, load balancing and centralized logging.
- CI/CD: Set up CI/CD pipelines to automate code integration, testing, and deployment to help your team innovate
How to Migrate from Heroku to AWS Using Kapstan
Estimated time to complete: ~2 hours
Step 1: Connect your AWS account to Kapstan
Establish a secure connection between Kapstan and your AWS account. We will set up your entire stack on AWS using Kapstan. With this seamless linkage, Kapstan empowers you to deploy and manage your applications with unparalleled efficiency directly within your AWS account.
Step 2: Configure your application
Kapstan should be granted access to the source code. Kapstan needs basic information like source directory and command to build and run the application. Configure the environment variables expected by the application. Kapstan will then ask for domain details for the application. With that, everything will be set up.
Step 3: Deploy your application
Click "deploy"
Step 4: Monitor your application
Discover the simplicity of cloud application debugging through Kapstan's monitoring functionalities, including "Health Overview," "Tail Logs," and "Search Logs." Additionally, Kapstan offers cloud cost analytics out of the box, empowering your developers to effectively monitor cloud provider expenses.
Step 5: Deploy database
You can bring up a database in a simple click.
Post-Migration Checklist
After migrating to AWS, continuous monitoring is essential to ensure optimal performance and reliability.
With Kapstan, you get continuous monitoring without additional set-up. If you’re not using Kapstan, you’ll need to set up the following:
- AWS CloudWatch: Set up CloudWatch for real-time monitoring of logs, metrics, and events.
- AWS X-Ray: Use X-Ray for distributed tracing to analyze and debug applications.
- Cost Management: Utilize AWS Cost Explorer to track and optimize your AWS spending.
- Security and Compliance: Regularly review security groups, IAM roles, and compliance settings to maintain a secure environment.
- Performance Tuning: Continuously analyze and optimize your applications and infrastructure for performance improvements.
Conclusion: Schedule Your Free Heroku to AWS Migration Call
Migrating from Heroku to AWS can significantly enhance your application’s performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
While the process can be complex, Kapstan simplifies the transition. Kapstan allows you to leverage AWS’s powerful infrastructure while giving you more control than Heroku.
Schedule a free migration call to learn how Kapstan can help you streamline your Heroku to AWS migration. Or, learn more about migrating from Heroku to AWS using Kapstan.
