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#2. PaaS is too expensive

But Heroku is soooo expensive! This is herd thinking and ignores the cost of finding, recruiting, and training great devops people to build and maintain your snowflake infrastructure. Not to mention the cost of retaining these people, putting them in an office, and providing ping pong tables or whatever else it takes to keep them happy.

Then there is the opportunity cost of hiring people in devops and sysadmin roles instead of product engineering. And those costs increase linearly as your business scales. With Heroku, you have diminishing marginal costs at scale.

And don’t forget the additional cost of your lack of focus. If you’re dealing with peripheral infrastructure matters, you’re not focused on making your product better.

Paying Heroku means you don’t have to worry about building your infrastructure and keeping it available at all times—and it still costs the same or less than hiring and retaining those additional ops people.

#3. PaaS is too constraining

But… but… my snowflake! A lot of people think their application or architecture has unique needs. In most cases, it doesn’t—and if it does, it probably shouldn’t. However, I’m prepared to accept a few legitimate reasons you might not be able to use Heroku. Here they are:

• You need tons of CPU or RAM. Heroku won’t scale as far as AWS, and configurations are a bit less flexible. If you really need thousands of servers, AWS (or even bare metal) may be more economical. But Heroku supports some pretty sizeable instances. For most people, it should be more than enough.
• You need bare-metal servers or specialty processors. If you’re doing machine learning or other GPU-intensive work, Heroku might not be a great fit. However, you can still take a hybrid approach like we do. We use Heroku, but also bare-metal servers to get the best performance for our virtualization platform.

#4. Heroku doesn’t do Docker

But I must have Docker! Fret no more. Since early September, you can deploy Docker images to Heroku. Even before that, Heroku included somewhat similar capabilities to Docker, allowing you to ship around containerized builds of your app.

.. #5. Heroku is not secure enough

.. There is no reason to believe Heroku is meaningfully less secure than AWS.

.. Plus, unlike your custom environment, Heroku is consistent and uniform. It has boundaries that are clearly defined, which means your attack surface is going to be smaller. That also means it’s easier to understand, so you’re less likely to do something by accident that creates a vulnerability.