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Ashwin Sharma P
Ashwin Sharma P

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What is Heroku and why should you use it?

This is my first post on dev.to and so I decided to write a short post on Heroku.

Heroku was a startup found in 2007 and had been funded $13 million in funding. But it went on to be bought by salesforce.com in the year 2010 for whopping cash of $212 million.

Heroku is used by the developers to deploy the apps on the web. It is a simple and easy way to make your app enter the market. It frees us from going behind the tasks of maintaining servers, hardware or framework. Heroku provides great tools and services for the developer.

Heroku is a Platform as a Service (PaaS). That is it is a platform which helps the users to develop, run and maintain their projects without worrying much about the framework or infrastructure.

One of the frequently asked questions is why Heroku costs more than AWS. A simple answer to this is that Heroku rules out the cost of DevOps staff. It offers us a subscription-based pricing structure.

Why developers go for Heroku?

• Heroku helps the developers focus on their main application and its functioning, thereby increasing their productivity.

• Simple yet efficient design.

• Heroku helps in fast app deployment by enabling the app to update with every git push and helps in running the app smoothly.

• Heroku also has free plans and helps millions to test and experiment their project.

• Heroku supports eight development languages and frameworks, which are Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, Node, Go, Scala and Clojure.

• It rules out the need to maintain our own server and hardware.
Heroku also gives us the add-ons support thus making the app development easy.

When is Heroku or PaaS ideal?

It is extremely handy when we have to deploy a product in the early stages.

It is helpful when we have to test our app and get quick feedback from the users.

It is a boon when our project has large hardware and computational requirements.

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