Migrating off Heroku to AWS without killing your deploy speed: the tools that actually help

Migrating from Heroku to AWS can reduce infrastructure costs or meet compliance, data residency, AWS-service, and network-control requirements, but it risks slowing software delivery if teams fail to replace Heroku’s integrated platform capabilities such as git-based deployments, review apps, managed databases, logging, TLS, and rollbacks. The article outlines three approaches: building an AWS platform internally with tools such as ECS Fargate or EKS, Terraform, GitHub Actions, and ArgoCD; moving to another managed PaaS such as Render, Railway, or Fly.io; or using an internal developer platform deployed in the organization’s AWS account, including Qovery, Porter, or Northflank BYOC. It recommends Fargate for smaller teams without Kubernetes expertise and EKS for organizations needing GitOps, custom controllers, or portability, while noting that AWS App Runner is suitable for simple stateless services but lacks preview environments and managed databases. A phased migration should inventory workloads, establish reproducible AWS infrastructure, run applications on AWS while retaining the Heroku database, gradually shift traffic, perform a planned database cutover, and reconcile costs before decommissioning Heroku. The article argues that organizations spending under roughly $2,000 monthly on PaaS services without compliance pressures may be better served by staying on a managed platform, as platform engineering costs can exceed infrastructure savings, and presents Qovery’s Terraform-based AWS migration service and potential AWS partner funding as an option for preserving developer experience while retaining AWS account ownership.

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