How to Migrate from Heroku to AWS: A Strategic Blueprint for Mid-Market Teams

Mid-sized engineering teams face significant advantages when migrating from Heroku to AWS, as the transition enables operational sovereignty, compliance with standards like SOC2 and HIPAA, and advanced networking capabilities that Heroku cannot provide. While AWS offers greater power and flexibility, moving from Heroku's "black box" environment to AWS can lead to "migration anxiety" due to the complexity of managing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and the potential for reduced developer velocity. Services like Qovery facilitate the migration process by automating the generation of Terraform and Dockerfiles, thus reducing the manual workload and accelerating the transition timeline. Companies often outgrow Heroku due to financial inefficiencies, architectural constraints, and compliance issues, making AWS a more viable option for enterprise-grade scale and customization. Despite the technical hurdles of transitioning to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), automated migration tools help mid-sized organizations retain developer happiness and maintain operational excellence, enabling them to complete migrations in days rather than months while enhancing control and cutting operational costs.