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  5. Amazon LightSail vs Heroku

Amazon LightSail vs Heroku

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Heroku
Heroku
Stacks25.8K
Followers20.5K
Votes3.2K
Amazon LightSail
Amazon LightSail
Stacks186
Followers394
Votes9

Amazon LightSail vs Heroku: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this comparison, we will analyze the key differences between Amazon LightSail and Heroku, two popular platforms for deploying and managing web applications.

  1. Pricing model: Amazon LightSail offers a predictable and straightforward pricing model based on fixed monthly plans, making it easier to estimate costs. On the other hand, Heroku follows a more flexible pricing model where costs are calculated per usage, including variables such as storage, data transfer, and add-ons.

  2. Scalability: Amazon LightSail provides more scalable options for applications, allowing users to easily scale up or down resources like CPU, RAM, and storage as needed. Heroku, on the other hand, has some limitations when it comes to scaling, especially for larger applications that require significant resources.

  3. Infrastructure management: While both platforms abstract away infrastructure management, Amazon LightSail requires more knowledge and control over the underlying infrastructure. Users have direct access to the virtual server instances and can configure various settings. In comparison, Heroku hides much of the infrastructure complexity, providing a more streamlined experience but with limited control.

  4. Integration with AWS services: Amazon LightSail seamlessly integrates with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings, providing access to a wide range of additional services like databases, CDN, and storage solutions. Heroku, although it does offer some integrations, is less tightly integrated with specific services and imposes more restrictions in terms of service availability.

  5. Deployment process: Amazon LightSail offers a straightforward deployment process, allowing users to easily upload and manage their application code. Heroku also simplifies deployment, but it adds an extra step where the code needs to be pushed to a Git repository before being deployed to the Heroku platform.

  6. Community and support: Heroku has a larger and more active community, which leads to a wealth of resources, tutorials, and plugins readily available. It also provides extensive documentation and support forums. While Amazon LightSail has a growing community, it is not as mature or as vibrant as the Heroku community.

In summary, Amazon LightSail offers a predictable pricing model, more scalable options, and tighter integration with AWS services. Heroku, on the other hand, provides a more streamlined experience with simplified infrastructure management and a larger community for support and resources.

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Advice on Heroku, Amazon LightSail

Alex
Alex

Oct 20, 2020

Decided

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.

101k views101k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Heroku
Heroku
Amazon LightSail
Amazon LightSail

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.

Everything you need to jumpstart your project on AWS—compute, storage, and networking—for a low, predictable price. Launch a virtual private server with just a few clicks.

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.
-
Statistics
Stacks
25.8K
Stacks
186
Followers
20.5K
Followers
394
Votes
3.2K
Votes
9
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 703
    Easy deployment
  • 459
    Free for side projects
  • 374
    Huge time-saver
  • 348
    Simple scaling
  • 261
    Low devops skills required
Cons
  • 27
    Super expensive
  • 9
    Not a whole lot of flexibility
  • 7
    Storage
  • 7
    No usable MySQL option
  • 5
    Low performance on free tier
Pros
  • 4
    Simple Deployment
  • 4
    Low cost
  • 1
    Simple pricing scheme
Integrations
Mailgun
Mailgun
Postmark
Postmark
Loggly
Loggly
Papertrail
Papertrail
Redis Cloud
Redis Cloud
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Nitrous.IO
Nitrous.IO
Logentries
Logentries
MongoLab
MongoLab
Gemfury
Gemfury
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Heroku, Amazon LightSail?

DigitalOcean

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.

Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2

It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Microsoft Azure

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.

Google App Engine

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.

Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Linode

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Scaleway

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

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