I’ve been using Heroku a lot recently for deploying code. For those who’ve missed it, it’s a rather nice Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering; think Google App Engine, but actually usable: no long list of forbidden or broken frameworks and libraries, you can use a relational database, and other such niceties.

I’ve had a number of people ask in conversation why I use (or indeed trust) Heroku and don’t just deploy on top of AWS. Then I came across this question asking “Why do people use Heroku when AWS is present?“ on Stack Overflow, which I thought did a pretty good job of explicitly covering some of the aspects of the choice.

Maybe I should have flagged the question as Not Constructive (it’s now closed because others have), but instead found myself using it as a bit of a dumping ground for my thoughts on the matter; if you’re interested, check it out, I hope it’s informative.