How DoorDash migrated from Heroku to AWS

DoorDash, founded in 2013, began its operations using Heroku due to its simplicity and cost-effectiveness, allowing the team to focus on product development rather than infrastructure. However, as DoorDash's traffic and operational demands increased, Heroku's limitations in performance, cost efficiency, reliability, and control became apparent, prompting the switch to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. AWS offered better scalability and performance-per-dollar, though it required a substantial investment in DevOps. To streamline the migration process, DoorDash utilized Docker, an open-source platform that simplifies managing containerized applications, enabling them to transition effectively by creating Docker images for their applications and deploying them on EC2 instances. This migration led to significant improvements, including a 2x performance gain, a reduction in API response times, halved background task execution times, and a lower hosting bill. The transition was accomplished within a month by two engineers, highlighting the significant role Docker played in the successful shift, enabling DoorDash to operate with enhanced control over their software stack and greater portability across cloud service providers.