As businesses grow, platforms like Heroku often become limiting. You start to feel the need for more control over networking, infrastructure, security, and scalability. That’s exactly where AWS comes in — but transitioning from a PaaS like Heroku to a powerful IaaS like AWS can feel overwhelming.
At Hybytes, we’ve helped several teams migrate from Heroku to AWS using Terraform, and in this post, I want to share a breakdown of how to approach this migration in a structured, repeatable way.
🔍 Why Migrate?
Heroku is great for getting started fast. But for growing teams, it brings challenges like:
- High costs at scale
- Limited infrastructure control
- Vendor lock-in
- Basic security/compliance tools
AWS provides the flexibility and scale you need — but requires good DevOps practices.
🛠️ Our Approach Using Terraform
We used Terraform to provision and manage infrastructure across:
- VPC, Subnets, Security Groups
- Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL)
- Amazon ECS/Fargate for containers
- SSM Parameter Store for config and secrets
- ALB + Route 53 for traffic routing
We broke down the migration into clear stages: infrastructure setup, data migration, containerization, CI/CD pipeline, then DNS cutover.
🧠Lessons Learned
- Always start with a staging environment before going live
- Use Terraform workspaces to manage multiple environments
- Set up CloudWatch and cost alerts from day one
- Replace Heroku Config Vars with SSM parameters securely
🧩 Tools We Used
- Terraform
- GitHub Actions for CI/CD
- Docker + Amazon ECR
- pg_dump / pg_restore for PostgreSQL migrations
- Datadog for monitoring
📦 Final Thoughts
Moving from Heroku to AWS isn’t just a technical migration — it’s a shift in how your team builds and operates. With Terraform, it becomes much more manageable, auditable, and scalable.
We’ve documented our full guide here:
👉 Read the full post on Medium
If you're planning something similar, feel free to connect. I’d love to share ideas or collaborate on content!
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