Overview

Heroku

Stacks25.8K

Followers20.5K

Votes3.2K

Cloud Foundry

Stacks190

Followers346

Votes5

Cloud Foundry vs Heroku: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Cloud Foundry and Heroku

Cloud Foundry and Heroku are both popular platform as a service (PaaS) solutions that offer cloud-based hosting for applications. While they may seem similar on the surface, there are several key differences between the two.

Deployment process: One significant difference between Cloud Foundry and Heroku is the deployment process. Cloud Foundry uses a buildpack-based deployment model, where applications are deployed using buildpacks that define the runtime and dependencies. On the other hand, Heroku uses a slug-based deployment model, where applications are deployed as immutable slugs.
Programming languages and frameworks: Another important difference lies in the programming languages and frameworks supported by each platform. Cloud Foundry provides a wide range of language support, including Java, Ruby, Node.js, and .NET, along with support for various frameworks. In contrast, Heroku has built a strong reputation as a platform for Ruby developers, although it also supports other languages like Python, Java, and Node.js.
Scalability options: Cloud Foundry and Heroku also differ in terms of the scalability options they offer. Cloud Foundry provides more advanced scaling capabilities, allowing users to scale applications both vertically (allocating more resources to a single instance) and horizontally (adding more instances of the application). Heroku, on the other hand, simplifies the scalability process to automatic horizontal scaling, making it easier for developers to handle traffic spikes.
Pricing model: The pricing models of Cloud Foundry and Heroku are also worth noting. Cloud Foundry is an open-source project and can be deployed on various cloud providers, allowing for more flexibility in terms of pricing. Heroku, owned by Salesforce, has a more straightforward pricing model, with different tiers based on allocated resources and add-ons.
Control and customization: When it comes to control and customization, Cloud Foundry offers more flexibility. Users have greater control over their deployment environment, with the ability to customize various aspects and have more control over infrastructure. In contrast, Heroku abstracts much of the infrastructure and provides a more simplified experience, making it easier for developers to focus on their applications rather than infrastructure management.
Ecosystem and community: Finally, the ecosystems and communities surrounding Cloud Foundry and Heroku are different. Cloud Foundry has a large and active community and benefits from the support of several major technology companies. Additionally, Cloud Foundry can be used with various cloud providers. On the other hand, Heroku has a strong community of Ruby developers and a curated marketplace of add-ons and services specific to the platform.

In summary, Cloud Foundry and Heroku differ in their deployment processes, supported programming languages, scalability options, pricing models, control and customization levels, and ecosystems. Choosing between the two platforms depends on specific requirements, preferences, and the intended use case.

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Advice on Heroku, Cloud Foundry

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

Ben

Web Designer & Developer at Self-employed

Apr 12, 2022

Decided

As I was running through freeCodeCamp's curriculum, I was becoming frustrated by Replit's black box nature as a shared server solution for Node app testing. I wanted to move into a proper workflow with Git and a dedicated deployment solution just for educational or non-commercial purposes. Heroku solved that for me in spades.

Not only does Heroku support free app deployment if you don't use their extra service handlers, but you can directly hook into your GitHub repos and automatically update the app whenever you commit to the main branch. It's a simple way to get an app running as fast as possible if you wish to share a proof of concept or prototype before moving to dedicated servers.

18.1k views18.1k

Comments

Alejandro

May 13, 2022

Review

I recently came across a training course on using Django and React together. That got me thinking about how to serve up the project and remember that Heroku had a great interface for serving up my Django/Python App so I would think it should work. Figured I would throw in my 2 cents, not sure if it helps.

1.25k views1.25k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Heroku	Cloud Foundry
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.	Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service (PaaS) that provides a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy, and scale applications.
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.	Application and services centric lifecycle API;High performance dynamic routing;Buildpack support;Data and web services brokers;Linux Container management;Role Based Access and Teams;Active application health management;Standards based user authentication and authorization;Integrated real time logging API;Multi-provider ecosystem
Statistics
Stacks 25.8K	Stacks 190
Followers 20.5K	Followers 346
Votes 3.2K	Votes 5
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 No usable MySQL option 7 Storage 5 Low performance on free tier	Pros 2 Perfectly aligned with springboot 1 Application health management 1 Free service discovery (Eureka) 1 Free distributed tracing (zipkin)
Integrations
Mailgun Postmark Loggly Papertrail Redis Cloud Red Hat Codeready Workspaces Nitrous.IO Logentries MongoLab Gemfury	VMware vSphere Logentries Amazon EC2 OpenStack Papertrail Amazon VPC Splunk Cloud Sumo Logic

What are some alternatives to Heroku, Cloud Foundry?

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.

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

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.

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.

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

Hasura

An open source GraphQL engine that deploys instant, realtime GraphQL APIs on any Postgres database.

Cloud 66

Cloud 66 gives you everything you need to build, deploy and maintain your applications on any cloud, without the headache of dealing with "server stuff". Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Jamstack, Laravel, GoLang, and more.

Jelastic

Jelastic is a Multi-Cloud DevOps PaaS for ISVs, telcos, service providers and enterprises needing to speed up development, reduce cost of IT infrastructure, improve uptime and security.

Dokku

It is an extensible, open source Platform as a Service that runs on a single server of your choice. It helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications from building to scaling.

PythonAnywhere

It's somewhat unique. A small PaaS that supports web apps (Python only) as well as scheduled jobs with shell access. It is an expensive way to tinker and run several small apps.