From Heroku to AWS: What Breaks If You’re Not Careful

Introduction

Heroku is great, until it isn’t.

Many teams start on Heroku because it removes infrastructure from the equation. Deployments are easy, scaling feels automatic, and nobody has to think about servers.

But as products grow, teams eventually hit limits:

• Costs become unpredictable

• Customization is restricted

• Performance tuning is opaque

• Enterprise requirements don’t fit

That’s when AWS enters the conversation.

The problem?
AWS doesn’t forgive assumptions Heroku quietly handled for you.

What Heroku Hides (And AWS Exposes)

Heroku abstracts away a lot of operational complexity:

• Networking

• Load balancing

• Logging

• Scaling rules

• Failures and restarts

On AWS, these are no longer “features”.
They’re decisions, and every decision has consequences.

Teams that treat AWS like “Heroku with more knobs” usually learn the hard way.

Breaking Point #1: Deployments

On Heroku:

• Push code

• App restarts

• Done

On AWS:

• CI/CD must be designed

• Rollbacks must be planned

• Blue/green or canary strategies matter

Common mistake:

Shipping code without a safe rollback path.

This turns small bugs into production incidents.

Breaking Point #2: Environments

Heroku encourages simplicity.
AWS punishes ambiguity.

Teams often:

• Mix dev and staging concerns

• Share resources unintentionally

• Create production dependencies in non-prod

Without clear environment boundaries, deployments become risky and debugging becomes slow.

Breaking Point #3: Scaling Expectations

Heroku scaling feels linear.
AWS scaling is conditional.

You must define:

• When scaling happens

• What scales

• How far it scales

• What happens when limits are hit

Without this, teams either:

• Overpay massively

• Or discover scaling issues under real traffic

Breaking Point #4: Observability

Heroku gives you “good enough” logs by default.

On AWS, you must design:

• Logging

• Metrics

• Alerts

• Dashboards

If you don’t, failures become silent, until users complain.

Breaking Point #5: Security & Access

Heroku’s permissions are simple.
AWS IAM is powerful, and dangerous.

Common mistakes:

• Overly broad permissions

• Shared credentials

• No audit visibility

These issues rarely explode immediately, but they compound over time.

Why Most Migrations Hurt More Than Expected

The migration itself is rarely the hard part.
The pain comes from missing foundations:

• No clear ownership of infrastructure

• No shared definition of “production-ready”

• No automation discipline

AWS magnifies these gaps instead of hiding them.

How to Migrate Without Breaking Things

Successful migrations usually:

• Start with environment clarity

• Introduce automation early

• Design deployment safety before traffic arrives

• Treat AWS as a platform, not a hosting provider

Teams that do this avoid the “AWS regret phase” many others hit.

Cloudwise helps teams move from Heroku to AWS without losing reliability, speed, or sleep.
If you’re planning a migration or already halfway through one, that’s usually the right moment to get experienced support involved.