What is Heroku and How does it work?

What is Heroku

Heroku is a cloud platform — Platform as a Service which is a container-based fully managed system on AWS. Data Services, Ad-ons, Plug-ins are fully integrated into Heroku for deployment and execution of modern applications.

The Heroku provides the developer-centric approach which helps users to be associated closely with the tools and workflows integrated with it.

Heroku is a Platform as a Service built on top of AWS, which provides a ready runtime environment and servers which eventually benefit development and DevOps teams for seamless integration to different development tools.

How it works?

When the code is pushed to Heroku Git, a slug (VM) gets created and it launches the VM (called dyno) to validate and update the environment with required libraries for code pushed.

The dynos are nothing but lightweight Linux containers

Heroku’s high level view for hosted application:

When you push your code to the Heroku container, it converts it into a slug and autoruns all your migrations and scripts and your application is hosted.

How it’s different

The platform is built keeping in mind for developers to integrate applications easily. Heroku is a fully managed platform which helps developers to keep focus more on application development.

You can provision a new application on Heroku in seconds. Deploying your code and restarting your processes typically takes just a few minutes.

Advantages

• Easy subscription plans to enroll as per the requirement.
• Wonderful live Dashboard for application/platform performance monitoring.
• Notification/Alerting system for any critical/configured spikes
• Heroku provides Add-ons for all your needs. You name it, they have it.
• Heroku Scheduler for scheduling any task which you want to run on a regular basis
• Support form Modern Open Source Languages (Node.js, Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Go, Scala, Clojure)
• Not at all need of DevOps Engineer to maintain Heroku platform

Read more to know the complete steps to deploy your application on Heroku.

Originally published at https://www.neovasolutions.com on June 8, 2020.