What does Heroku do?

The beloved, tragic platform as a service explained

## The TL;DR

Heroku, founded in 2007, was (and is) one of the first cloud platforms as a service. Heroku makes it easy to build and run applications in the cloud without the need to set up or manage your own infrastructure.

• Though easier than in the past, setting up your application today requires a good deal of configuration and maintenance

• Standard infrastructure as a service offerings (AWS EC2, etc.) have lots and lots of knobs and buttons to nail down (flexibility comes at a cost!)

• Heroku (and PaaS like it) greatly simplify everything for developers and makes it easy to deploy and run apps 

• Key Heroku features: auto deploy from GitHub, straightforward CLI, simple pricing, plugin ecosystem

In many ways, Heroku was ahead of its time: they were acquired by Salesforce in 2010 (12 years ago!), and since then have mostly gone downhill. It’s hard to find a product as beloved by developers as Heroku (and as tragic), so it’s worth understanding what they do.

This post is a guest spot from Danish Khan, a friend of mine with a lot of API building and using experience at companies like GitHub and Travis CI. If you like it, give him a shoutout on Twitter.

– Justin

## Setting the stage: AWS EC2

The easiest – and perhaps most important – way to understand Heroku is to first understand what it looks like to deploy an app using the run of the mill infrastructure as a service offerings like EC2. EC2 stands for elastic compute cloud, all made up words, frankly. 

🔮 Dependencies 🔮

If you aren’t familiar with AWS, it’s worth at least skimming the Technically AWS for the rest of us post before reading on.

🔮 Dependencies 🔮