Heroku is one of the most well known PaaS platforms out there, and is dearly loved by many developers and startups. As some companies grow, however, they find that they need access to a more custom environment, or the ability to scale their environment without a linear growth in infrastructure cost. Several of these companies have come to Foghorn for assistance in migrating from Heroku to AWS.
One of our customers, an online retailer, recently went through this growth curve. They were interested in migrating off of Heroku and on to AWS. After testing their app on EKS, we quickly decided that this was the right infrastructure for their new home.
We assisted in the containerization of their applications and the configuration of a gitops deployment model, with full CI/CD automation leveraging AWS ECR as our container image repository. After building this functionality, however, it became clear that Heroku had offered the developers many more tools that they had come to rely on for management, deployment, rollback, etc.
We helped build out some custom tools to help bridge this gap, and then assisted in the migration from Heroku to EKS. After the migration, the customer has the benefits of lower cost, a more configurable and customizable environment, and access to the broad set of services available at AWS.
Lessons learned? When planning for an infrastructure transformation, in addition to collecting requirements from customers and business owners, make sure you understand the developers’ workflows, capabilities, and tools!
