Migrating off Heroku to AWS with near-zero downtime: the 5 real options

Migrating from Heroku to AWS involves choosing among consultancies for complex or regulated migrations, infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi for teams prepared to operate AWS themselves, managed platforms such as Qovery or PandaStack for a Heroku-like deployment experience in a customer-owned AWS account, or native AWS services for simpler applications. The central decision is who will handle ongoing responsibilities including networking, IAM, scaling, certificates, databases, monitoring, and on-call support, rather than merely who performs the initial move. For near-zero downtime, the recommended approach is to run Heroku and AWS environments in parallel, replicate the PostgreSQL database, reduce DNS TTLs to 60 seconds well before cutover, briefly pause writes while the replica catches up, validate the AWS deployment, switch DNS, and retain Heroku as a rollback option for 48 hours. The article notes that migrations often take days for a small application on a managed platform, four to eight weeks with a hand-built AWS setup, and one to three months for larger consultancy-led projects, while emphasizing that AWS’s lower raw infrastructure costs must be weighed against the operational burden inherited after leaving Heroku.

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