If you’re on Heroku to start with, it makes sense to compare it to the same DB system in the same cloud provider, which will offer similar latencies. You can then keep using the Heroku dynos for running the app, just connecting to the AWS RDS for the storage. Thus seeing AWS as the comparison makes a lot of sense.
It’s a convenience vs control trade-off. On another axis, there’s “Heroku repo integration” vs “build a Docker image and tell Heroku to run that” – again convenience vs control, and once you have container images, you can “more” easily move to a different provider if wanted.
But to get “keep using Heroku, and repo integrations, but get the data stored somewhere where we can meet our non-optional legal obligations, and without adding a major latency increase between the front-end and the storage”, just moving the DB to native RDS is a good step.
And what does Heroku specifically have over RDS? All of the other convenience integrations and CLI tooling which “just works” without having to be a cloud expert.
I hate marketing fluff as much as the next crustacean, but I didn’t get that vibe from this article.
The unverifiable certificates and GDPR concerns are both completely legitimate. The author provides fair comparisons of features, noting downsides of RDS where appropriate. Yes, the article clearly favors AWS. The conclusion outright says so. But I think they justified their conclusion from their point of view.
The only part that felt like marketing to me was the end, obviously:
Thanks for making it to the end. Time for a bit of self-marketing:
If you want to rethink your app’s database infrastructure but you’re not sure how to proceed, you can get in touch. I’m currently available for consulting gigs.
Heroku’s a lot easier, at just about every step. Knowing what you’re paying is easier, configuring your app for it is easier, the jargon’s easier, and the documentation’s easier.
Does Heroku offer network peering with AWS services on other accounts? Or does AWS magically reroute RDS traffic to public IPs via AWS infrastructure? I’m trying to understand why there isn’t a latency penalty since naively routing from Heroku VMs on AWS to a public IP is going to hit the public internet.
Hi, author here. Honestly I don’t know tech details on how it works. From my experience migrating a medium size client’s application from Heroku addon to RDS, none of the performance measuring tools reported any overhead after the switch.
Maybe Heroku routing is able to detect that RDS hostname is in the same AWS region and does not go over the public net?
That read a lot like marketing for AWS.
What does Heroku have to recommend it over AWS?
If you’re on Heroku to start with, it makes sense to compare it to the same DB system in the same cloud provider, which will offer similar latencies. You can then keep using the Heroku dynos for running the app, just connecting to the AWS RDS for the storage. Thus seeing AWS as the comparison makes a lot of sense.
It’s a convenience vs control trade-off. On another axis, there’s “Heroku repo integration” vs “build a Docker image and tell Heroku to run that” – again convenience vs control, and once you have container images, you can “more” easily move to a different provider if wanted.
But to get “keep using Heroku, and repo integrations, but get the data stored somewhere where we can meet our non-optional legal obligations, and without adding a major latency increase between the front-end and the storage”, just moving the DB to native RDS is a good step.
And what does Heroku specifically have over RDS? All of the other convenience integrations and CLI tooling which “just works” without having to be a cloud expert.
I hate marketing fluff as much as the next crustacean, but I didn’t get that vibe from this article.
The unverifiable certificates and GDPR concerns are both completely legitimate. The author provides fair comparisons of features, noting downsides of RDS where appropriate. Yes, the article clearly favors AWS. The conclusion outright says so. But I think they justified their conclusion from their point of view.
The only part that felt like marketing to me was the end, obviously:
Quite right! That’s why I asked my additional question–since I could certainly be wrong.
Heroku’s a lot easier, at just about every step. Knowing what you’re paying is easier, configuring your app for it is easier, the jargon’s easier, and the documentation’s easier.
Thanks for the article, lots of useful info. Have you looked at the Digital Ocean managed instance, and how it compares?
Across what axes? Price? Features? Ease of administration? Just curious.
Hi, author here. I’m following up this blog post with an eBook on how to the migration even if you have no AWS experience in your team: https://pawelurbanek.com/heroku-migrate-postgres-rds
Does Heroku offer network peering with AWS services on other accounts? Or does AWS magically reroute RDS traffic to public IPs via AWS infrastructure? I’m trying to understand why there isn’t a latency penalty since naively routing from Heroku VMs on AWS to a public IP is going to hit the public internet.
Hi, author here. Honestly I don’t know tech details on how it works. From my experience migrating a medium size client’s application from Heroku addon to RDS, none of the performance measuring tools reported any overhead after the switch.
Maybe Heroku routing is able to detect that RDS hostname is in the same AWS region and does not go over the public net?