[smathieu]

There's no reason why you can't have Heroku to connect to a RDS instance or a DB you manage yourself. It's not has easy as using the Heroku way, but not very difficult either.

[hdra]

I'm curious, would this adds considerable amount of latency to the DB queries? I'm guessing connecting to RDS from an EC2 instance would have less latency compared to connecting to RDS from a Heroku or DigitalOcean instance, but how much is the difference and is it significant enough?

[arnvald]

Heroku's hosted on Amazon servers, so you still can have your app and db in the same data center