Amazon RDS vs Heroku Postgres: What are the differences?
Developers describe Amazon RDS as "Set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud". Amazon RDS gives you access to the capabilities of a familiar MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database engine. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing databases can be used with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period and enabling point-in-time recovery. You benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your Database Instance (DB Instance) via a single API call. On the other hand, Heroku Postgres is detailed as "Heroku's Database-as-a-Service. Based on the most powerful open-source database, PostgreSQL". Heroku Postgres provides a SQL database-as-a-service that lets you focus on building your application instead of messing around with database management.
Amazon RDS and Heroku Postgres are primarily classified as "SQL Database as a Service" and "PostgreSQL as a Service" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Amazon RDS are:
- Pre-configured Parameters
- Monitoring and Metrics
- Automatic Software Patching
On the other hand, Heroku Postgres provides the following key features:
- High Availability
- Rollback
- Dataclips
"Reliable failovers" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon RDS over the competitors, whereas "Easy to setup" was stated as the key factor in picking Heroku Postgres.
According to the StackShare community, Amazon RDS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1437 company stacks & 526 developers stacks; compared to Heroku Postgres, which is listed in 74 company stacks and 39 developer stacks.