Why Heroku and AWS have failed to serve modern developers?
Heroku Vs. AWS remains a long and persistent debate among developers. Both platforms have strengths and weaknesses. Over the last 10 years, Heroku and AWS played a huge role in the cloud hosting and software development industry, by significantly unlocking productivity in a way that it has never been reached before. They are the platforms behind most of the successes from the last decade. However, we are in 2022 and it still looks like if we (developers) were in 2010 to deploy our apps in the cloud.
By using Heroku, developers benefit from a great developer experience to deploy their apps; at the price of flexibility, control over the infrastructure (no fine-tuning for your DB), and going beyond what Heroku allows (static IPs and VPC for Enterprise plan only, no private subnet, only 2 regions,... ).
Wherewith AWS, you will benefit from the full flexibility, powerful infrastructure capabilities, and tons of great services; but at the price of dealing with all the over-complexity of their services. Have you ever tried to simply deploy a simple app? - you will need to set up a VPC, a load balancer, a security group, a container registry, etc... until you maybe succeed to deploy your app. Otherwise good luck!
At the same time, for years now, I am seeing a new generation of developers and CTOs emerging. Those people are building services that you use every day and want to keep focusing on what they are building without compromising on using the best services that service cloud providers like AWS can provide.
Over the past 12 months, I’ve talked with 350+ CTOs & Developers from the US, Europe, and Asia to better understand how do they work on Heroku and AWS and what they expected from them. In this article, I’ll share (i) the most common challenges this new generation faces, and (ii) what do they need.
The 3 main challenges modern developers are facing in 2022
I will describe each challenge scenario with a real quote from the CTOs and developers we met.
Challenge 1. As the company grows, developers move out from Heroku limitations to AWS but run into complexity
Challenge 2. Keeping developers focused on “dev work”
Challenge 3. Keeping developers productive while the team is growing
Agents ship fast. Guardrails keep them safe.
Qovery ensures every agent action is scoped, audited, and policy-checked. Start deploying in under 10 minutes.
Morgan co-founded Qovery and leads engineering. He writes about Kubernetes architecture, DevOps best practices, and building resilient infrastructure at scale.
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Agents ship fast. Guardrails keep them safe.
Qovery ensures every agent action is scoped, audited, and policy-checked. Start deploying in under 10 minutes.
