How We Migrated from Heroku to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Using Docker

Description and use

The team migrated their application from Heroku to AWS using Docker to reduce costs and gain infrastructure control.

Problem

The team needed to move their application from Heroku to AWS to gain more control over infrastructure and reduce costs.

Outcome

The migration completed with the application running on AWS ECS Fargate, providing comparable scalability to Heroku while reducing monthly costs and increasing control over the runtime environment.

Workflow

• 1. Containerized the application using Docker.
• 2. Created a Dockerfile and built the image locally.
• 3. Pushed the image to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).
• 4. Defined ECS task definitions and services.
• 5. Configured networking, load balancing, and auto‑scaling on AWS.
• 6. Migrated database and environment variables to AWS RDS and Parameter Store.
• 7. Tested the deployment and switched traffic from Heroku to AWS.

Evidence

We migrated from Heroku to AWS using Docker, which allowed us to maintain the same deployment process while gaining more control over the infrastructure.

Source