EC2 vs Heroku – Which is the best?

This article will compare EC2 vs Heroku. It will provide an overview of each platform, core features, and pricing structure.

Developers who do not want to invest heavily in hardware upfront that is necessary to create highly complex applications and deploy them, rely on the cloud platform.

A large number of cloud platforms are available in the market that offers the developers a ready-made infrastructure to create sophisticated apps and deploy them online. 

If you are looking for a robust cloud platform for your app development and deployment needs, you can look at the features of two top cloud platforms in the market- EC2 and Heroku.

To help you figure out which one of these two is perfect for your needs, read this blog.

What is AWS EC2?

AWS EC2 (Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud) is a cloud platform that offers the developers the infrastructure that is needed to develop and deploy applications quickly.

It offers a scalable computing capacity for your app. Therefore, you can easily scale your app as per the traffic it is attracting.

This platform is based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and allows you to use any number of virtual servers according to your needs. 

EC2 Features

EC2 has several important features that make it very popular amongst the app developer community, some of them are as follows:

• Worldwide spread of infrastructure

The EC2 has a global infrastructure that gives you the provision to use instances in multiple locations.

This offers a great advantage to the app developer as the locations in the EC2 are created in such a way that they are insulated from any failure in other locations.

If you launch instances in multiple availability zones, you can safeguard your application from any failure that may happen in a particular location.

• The Amazon Time sync service

The Amazon time sync service offers a highly reliable, precise and available time source for any AWS services that include EC2 instances.

• Multiple operating systems and software choices 

EC2 cloud platform gives developers a wide choice of operating systems and software for mobile app development and deployment.

These include Microsoft Windows, Linux, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux 2, SUSE, CentOS, Debian, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Such a wide range of choices allows the app developer to choose the best software and operating system to create a well-designed and feature-rich App.

• Only pay for what you are using 

The EC2 offers you a per-second billing package. This ensures that you have to pay only for what you are using when you are on this platform. 

• Autoscaling

The automatic scaling option that you find in the EC2 can adjust the scale of your app as per your requirement. The predictive and dynamic scaling feature allows you to add or remove EC2 instances based on your needs. 

• Maximise the compute performance and its cost

A single API call in EC2 allows you to create compute capacity across EC2 instance types, purchase models and availability zones to optimise cost, performance and scale.

• Easy pause and resume instances

The EC2 gives the developer the ability to hibernate their instances and then resume them at the same state later. This is perfect for those applications that take some time to bootstrap.

• Storage

There are different storage options for different needs like integrated instance storage, Amazon elastic Block store, and Amazon elastic file system. 

EC2 Pricing

It has five different pricing models.

Free Pack: Amazon EC2 is free to try. Its free tier package consists of 750 hours of Windows and Linux t2 micro instances.

On-demand instances: You have to pay for the compute capacity that you are using by the hour or seconds (it depends upon which instance you are running).

Spot Instances: You can demand the spare capacity of Amazon EC2 computing for a 90% discount on the demand price.

Saving Plans: A highly flexible pricing model which allows you to use EC2 at a very low cost. In exchange, you have to commit to a consistent amount of usage for 1 to 3 years.

Dedicated Hosts: It is a premium plan in which a physical EC2 server is dedicated for your use only. The pricing model of this plan is a bit higher compared to the other pricing packages offered by Amazon EC2.

What is Heroku?

Heroku is a very robust application development cloud platform. This PaaS cloud platform allows the developers to design, create and deploy highly complex applications. 

Heroku Features

Heroku offers many important features that make the job of the app developer easier and faster.

It has a free price package: If you want to create a basic app with very simple functionalities, then you should use the free package of Heroku. 

Easy-to-use: The Heroku PaaS is extremely easy-to-use and is great for small as well as big enterprises. The Heroku dashboard gives you complete control over your app. You can manage it and if needed scale it up. 

Developer friendly: Heroku is focused to make the job of developers easier. The developers can access a range of app development tools to make their coding easier and faster. 

Easy scaling: Heroku relies on Dynos to run a code. Each dyno has memory, CPU, codes and related dependencies. It has a sophisticated auto-scaling feature that can find rising traffic and based on it automatically creates more dyno to cope with the spike in traffic.

Third-party support: Heroku cloud platform allows add-ons and third-party support. This helps the developers to provide more functionalities and features in their app. 

Heroku Pricing

Heroku has four pricing plans.

Free and Hobby: In this plan, you can use this platform completely free. Here you will only get some basic functionalities and tools. 

Production: In this plan, you have to pay $ 25 per month. 

Advanced: In this pack, you have to pay $250 per month to access a range of functionalities for your app development needs.

The enterprise: In this plan, you have to pay for the functionality you have chosen. It is created for large enterprises which require highly complex apps for their business needs. 

EC2 vs Heroku Comparison

Generally speaking, we are not comparing apples to apples here.

EC2 is a not managed computing service from AWS. It delivers access to multiple types of virtual machines distributed across AWS locations. The end-user manages provisioning, deployment, management, and scalability.

On the other hand, Heroku is a fully-managed service that runs on top of EC2 and provides users with a ready-to-use infrastructure that is fully managed and scalable.

EC2 categorizes under a IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service and Heroku under a PaaS – Platform as a Service. To better understand the differences, please read the article IaaS vs PaaS.

The table below helps to understand the differences:

Conclusion

Both of these cloud-based platforms offer amazing functionalities. If you are looking for easy app management and faster scalability, then you should choose EC2.

On the other hand, if your requirement is for easy deployment, time-saving and free use for side projects, the Heroku cloud platform is a great choice.