[oceanplexian]

I'm curious why people put so much effort into scaling Heroku when you could outperform the maximum number of Dynos with only a handful of AWS instances for a fraction the price. It doesn't make sense. We're literally working around a problem that shouldn't exist.

[werkshy]

We certainly don't use Heroku for the price. I've got a fair amount of experience running distributed apps on AWS and I have found that Heroku do provide a lot of value-added services on top (from deployment to database provisioning). For us, the best reason to use Heroku is that when AWS has a problem, Heroku can actually do something about it. Try calling AWS support when a whole availability zone just went down!

Of course, we are a Rails shop who have been on Heroku since we launched, so Heroku is really tailor made for us. If you're happy on raw AWS, good for you. Every hour I'm not thinking about AWS is an hour I can be writing a feature for our 10-month-old startup. The extra cost of Heroku is negligible when viewed in that light.

[alexatkeplar]

This is exactly what I'm wondering too. It's ingenious, but isn't Heroku + GA Live + Dynosaur both more complex and more expensive than just using AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which has Auto Scaling? What am I missing?