Item: Heroku Platform
Rating: 9
Author: Richard Rout

Overall Satisfaction with Heroku

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Heroku to deploy and host our backend services. It was used by the whole company and it made deploying, hosting and scaling our software and infrastructure so easy to manage and do, we didn't need to hire a specialized devops or IT person to manage it for us.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to use
Easy to deploy services
Easy to add plugins

Cons

Could provide a bit more customization
Could be a little easier on the pricing side
Could provide better insight tools

Return on Investment

Easy to maintain infrastructure
Easy to publish updates
Easy to configure
Easy to add plugins

Usability

Heroku is aimed at being super usable. It provides a very powerful free tier, and scales up well from there. You can deploy your code with just 1 command, if you use a standard setup, it knows how to build and start with ease.
Adding plugins is super easy - and they provide a huge array of useful tools and add-ons.

Support Rating

I never had to contact Heroku support. Everything just worked, or I was able to figure it out with just a few minutes of reading the docs or googling around for an answer. From setting up scheduled tasks with a plugin, or changing the deploy script so it calls a custom command. Everything was easy to figure out and do - it has a large development community and really useful docs.

Alternatives Considered

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google Kubernetes Engine

Heroku is an all in 1 package for deploying and running your services. It provides an easy to use setup and run for 90% of cases. If you have a more complicated infrastructure, you'd definitely need to move to another hosting provider. But if as long as you can operate within that regular scenario, Heroku will serve you well.

Likelihood to Recommend

Heroku is SO much less complicated than any other hosting providers out there. You can go from writing an app to having it deployed in a matter of minutes. You don't have to worry about physical machines, specifications, rolling deployments, uptime, or anything. Heroku handles everything for you with a series of simple commands.
It's not great if you want ultimate control over all those aspects.

Heroku Platform Feature Ratings

Comments

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An amazingly easy deployment and hosting service