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  5. Apache Tomcat vs Heroku

Apache Tomcat vs Heroku

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Heroku
Heroku
Stacks25.8K
Followers20.5K
Votes3.2K
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Stacks16.9K
Followers12.6K
Votes201
GitHub Stars8.0K
Forks5.3K

Apache Tomcat vs Heroku: What are the differences?

<Apache Tomcat vs Heroku>

1. **Deployment Approach**: Apache Tomcat is typically used for self-hosting, where the user is responsible for managing and deploying the application on their own server. On the other hand, Heroku is a platform as a service (PaaS) that allows developers to deploy applications without worrying about server maintenance, scaling, or infrastructure management.
2. **Scalability**: Apache Tomcat may require manual scaling of servers to accommodate increased traffic or workload, while Heroku offers automatic scaling based on the demand, allowing applications to handle varying levels of traffic without manual intervention.
3. **Pricing Model**: Apache Tomcat is free to use, as it is an open-source server, but users are responsible for server maintenance and hosting costs. Heroku, on the other hand, follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on resources used, offering a convenient solution for developers who prefer a managed platform with transparent pricing.
4. **Integration and Ecosystem**: Apache Tomcat is a standalone server that can be integrated with various tools and technologies based on user preferences. Heroku, being a cloud platform, offers seamless integration with popular development tools, databases, and add-ons, providing a rich ecosystem for developers to build and deploy applications easily.
5. **Support and Maintenance**: Apache Tomcat users need to manage server updates, patches, and security measures themselves, whereas Heroku handles maintenance tasks such as security updates, server management, and infrastructure maintenance, allowing developers to focus on building and improving their applications.
6. **Flexibility and Control**: Apache Tomcat provides users with full control over the server configuration and environment, allowing for customization to suit specific requirements. In contrast, Heroku abstracts infrastructure details to offer a simpler deployment process, sacrificing some degree of control for ease of use.

In Summary, Apache Tomcat and Heroku differ in deployment approach, scalability, pricing model, integration, support and maintenance, as well as flexibility and control.

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Advice on Heroku, Apache Tomcat

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
Hari
Hari

Mar 3, 2020

Needs advice

I was in a situation where I have to configure 40 RHEL servers 20 each for Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat server. My task was to

  1. configure LVM with required logical volumes, format and mount for HTTP and Tomcat servers accordingly.
  2. Install apache and tomcat.
  3. Generate and apply selfsigned certs to http server.
  4. Modify default ports on Tomcat to different ports.
  5. Create users on RHEL for application support team.
  6. other administrative tasks like, start, stop and restart HTTP and Tomcat services.

I have utilized the power of ansible for all these tasks, which made it easy and manageable.

419k views419k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Heroku
Heroku
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat

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.

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

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
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
8.0K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
5.3K
Stacks
25.8K
Stacks
16.9K
Followers
20.5K
Followers
12.6K
Votes
3.2K
Votes
201
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
  • 79
    Easy
  • 72
    Java
  • 49
    Popular
  • 1
    Spring web
Cons
  • 3
    Blocking - each http request block a thread
  • 2
    Easy to set up
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, Apache Tomcat?

NGINX

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

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.

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.

Unicorn

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

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.

Microsoft IIS

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Passenger

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Render

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.

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