Heroku vs Kubernetes

Overview

Heroku

Stacks25.8K

Followers20.5K

Votes3.2K

Kubernetes

Stacks61.2K

Followers52.8K

Votes685

Heroku vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Heroku is a cloud platform that enables developers to build, deploy, and scale applications easily, while Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of hosts. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Hosting Platform: Heroku is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) that simplifies application deployment, while Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Level of Control: Heroku provides a higher level of abstraction and hides the underlying infrastructure details, making it easy to deploy applications without worrying about infrastructure management. In contrast, Kubernetes offers fine-grained control over the infrastructure, allowing users to customize and optimize their deployment configurations.
Scalability: Heroku provides an auto-scaling feature that automatically adjusts the number of dynos (containers) based on the application's load. Kubernetes also supports auto-scaling but provides more advanced scaling features, such as horizontal pod autoscaling, which allows scaling individual pods based on CPU utilization.
Customization and Extensibility: Heroku provides a streamlined user experience with limited customization options, focusing on simplicity. On the other hand, Kubernetes offers extensive customization and extensibility options, allowing users to configure various resources like networking, storage, and security policies according to their specific requirements.
Vendor Lock-In: Heroku is a cloud-based platform provided by Salesforce, hence there is a level of vendor lock-in as all applications need to be deployed on the Heroku platform. Kubernetes, being an open-source technology, provides more flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in as it can be deployed on any cloud provider or on-premises infrastructure.
Learning Curve: Heroku is known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it quick to learn and deploy applications. On the other hand, Kubernetes has a steeper learning curve due to its complex architecture and various concepts like pods, services, replica sets, and deployments. It requires more time and effort to master Kubernetes compared to Heroku.

In summary, Heroku is a managed PaaS with simplified deployment, while Kubernetes provides fine-grained control and advanced features for container orchestration, making it more suitable for complex and scalable deployments.

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Advice on Heroku, Kubernetes

Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 27, 2020

Decidedon

GitHub

GitHub Pages

Markdown

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

@{GitHub}|tool:27| (incl. @{GitHub Pages}|tool:683|/@{Markdown}|tool:1147| for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
Respectively @{Git}|tool:1046| as revision control system
@{SourceTree}|tool:1599| as @{Git}|tool:1046| GUI
@{Visual Studio Code}|tool:4202| as IDE
@{CircleCI}|tool:190| for continuous integration (automatize development process)
@{Prettier}|tool:7035| / @{TSLint}|tool:5561| / @{ESLint}|tool:3337| as code linter
@{SonarQube}|tool:2638| as quality gate
@{Docker}|tool:586| as container management (incl. @{Docker Compose}|tool:3136| for multi-container application management)
@{VirtualBox}|tool:774| for operating system simulation tests
@{Kubernetes}|tool:1885| as cluster management for docker containers
@{Heroku}|tool:133| for deploying in test environments
@{nginx}|tool:1052| as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
@{SSLMate}|tool:2752| (using @{OpenSSL}|tool:3091|) for certificate management
@{Amazon EC2}|tool:18| (incl. @{Amazon S3}|tool:25|) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
@{PostgreSQL}|tool:1028| as preferred database system
@{Redis}|tool:1031| as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.

12.8M views12.8M

Comments

Russel

Lead Engineer at StackShare

Jul 19, 2019

Decidedon

Heroku

Kubernetes

Amazon EKS

We began our hosting journey, as many do, on Heroku because they make it easy to deploy your application and automate some of the routine tasks associated with deployments, etc. However, as our team grew and our product matured, our needs have outgrown Heroku. I will dive into the history and reasons for this in a future blog post.

We decided to migrate our infrastructure to Kubernetes running on Amazon EKS. Although Google Kubernetes Engine has a slightly more mature Kubernetes offering and is more user-friendly; we decided to go with EKS because we already using other AWS services (including a previous migration from Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS). We are still in the process of moving our main website workloads to EKS, however we have successfully migrate all our staging and testing PR apps to run in a staging cluster. We developed a Slack chatops application (also running in the cluster) which automates all the common tasks of spinning up and managing a production-like cluster for a pull request. This allows our engineering team to iterate quickly and safely test code in a full production environment. Helm plays a central role when deploying our staging apps into the cluster. We use CircleCI to build docker containers for each PR push, which are then published to Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECR). An upgrade-operator process watches the ECR repository for new containers and then uses Helm to rollout updates to the staging environments. All this happens automatically and makes it really easy for developers to get code onto servers quickly. The immutable and isolated nature of our staging environments means that we can do anything we want in that environment and quickly re-create or restore the environment to start over.

The next step in our journey is to migrate our production workloads to an EKS cluster and build out the CD workflows to get our containers promoted to that cluster after our QA testing is complete in our staging environments.

656k views656k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Heroku	Kubernetes
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.	Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
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.	Lightweight, simple and accessible;Built for a multi-cloud world, public, private or hybrid;Highly modular, designed so that all of its components are easily swappable
Statistics
Stacks 25.8K	Stacks 61.2K
Followers 20.5K	Followers 52.8K
Votes 3.2K	Votes 685
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 166 Leading docker container management solution 130 Simple and powerful 108 Open source 76 Backed by google 58 The right abstractions Cons 16 Steep learning curve 15 Poor workflow for development 8 Orchestrates only infrastructure 4 High resource requirements for on-prem clusters 2 Too heavy for simple systems
Integrations
Mailgun Postmark Loggly Papertrail Redis Cloud Red Hat Codeready Workspaces Nitrous.IO Logentries MongoLab Gemfury	Vagrant Docker Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure Google Compute Engine Ansible Google Kubernetes Engine

What are some alternatives to Heroku, Kubernetes?

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.

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

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.

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

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.

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

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.

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

Related Comparisons

Heroku vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Hosting Platform: Heroku is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) that simplifies application deployment, while Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Level of Control: Heroku provides a higher level of abstraction and hides the underlying infrastructure details, making it easy to deploy applications without worrying about infrastructure management. In contrast, Kubernetes offers fine-grained control over the infrastructure, allowing users to customize and optimize their deployment configurations.
Scalability: Heroku provides an auto-scaling feature that automatically adjusts the number of dynos (containers) based on the application's load. Kubernetes also supports auto-scaling but provides more advanced scaling features, such as horizontal pod autoscaling, which allows scaling individual pods based on CPU utilization.
Customization and Extensibility: Heroku provides a streamlined user experience with limited customization options, focusing on simplicity. On the other hand, Kubernetes offers extensive customization and extensibility options, allowing users to configure various resources like networking, storage, and security policies according to their specific requirements.
Vendor Lock-In: Heroku is a cloud-based platform provided by Salesforce, hence there is a level of vendor lock-in as all applications need to be deployed on the Heroku platform. Kubernetes, being an open-source technology, provides more flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in as it can be deployed on any cloud provider or on-premises infrastructure.
Learning Curve: Heroku is known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it quick to learn and deploy applications. On the other hand, Kubernetes has a steeper learning curve due to its complex architecture and various concepts like pods, services, replica sets, and deployments. It requires more time and effort to master Kubernetes compared to Heroku.

Heroku vs Kubernetes

Overview