Migration from Heroku to Amazon Web Services

1. From Heroku to AWS
A database migration story

2. Our application in focus

3. A simplified view of our infrastructure

4. The beginnings
Our Company
A Web-based
all-in-one HR
benefits and
payroll platform.
Our need
A place to host
our web app and
store our data.
Heroku
“A platform as a
service that enables
developers to build,
run, and operate
applications entirely in
the cloud.”

7. Challenges
Cost
Heroku operates on AWS
Which makes it more
expensive than AWS by
nature. The same applies
for Heroku database
offerings. Deployment is
not flexible even at
higher pricing plan.
Customization
Lock-in
Heroku lets us scale
without knowing the
infrastructure deeply.
Hard to expand to other
regions. Hard to integrate
with other advanced
services.
Performance
Stable but unpredictable
Heroku’s performance is
pretty stable, but in case of
regressions it doesn’t
provide any methods to
monitor our database and
is unfixable.

8. Solution
Migrate to AWS
Obviously efficient move if given
enough human resources and time.

9. Amazon RDS in focus

10. What is Amazon RDS?

11. Benefits of Amazon RDS - Scalability

12. Benefits of Amazon RDS - High availability

13. Benefits of Amazon RDS - Reliability

14. Benefits of Amazon RDS - Cost and maintenance

15. Ultimate business effect

16. Development Impact

17. 8/2018
Migrate database from
Heroku to AWS
22/09/2018
Fully operate solely on
Amazon Web Service
Our timeline

18. Sentry Error
Database related errors are reduced dramatically.

19. Detailed monitoring is now possible.

20. Cost is optimized
Amazon RDS: about $800 a month Heroku: $1500/month

21. Perfectly tuned for business queries

22. Enhanced security
1. Database access is restricted to only the servers and people who need it.
2. We can limit database users with various permission levels.
3. Even if somebody did have the connection information, they still couldn’t
access the database without being able to get inside the VPC.
4. ….
Simply superior to Heroku

23. Thank you for
your attention