Introduction to Heroku

Application deployment methods

In the old days, deploying an application meant buying hardware and placing it at a high-volume point on the internet. Nobody starts this way anymore because cheaper and quicker options are now available. For many applications, such as information portals and web stores, the quickest path is to use a web creation platform, like Shopify or Squarespace. For less cookie-cutter applications, such as those requiring custom logic and fine-grained control of the application, developers tend to choose to deploy to the cloud, using a service such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. These flexible and powerful approaches allow us to scale up resources as needed and only pay for what we use. This is all terrific, but they’re not easy to set up and manage. Most companies hire a DevOps engineer to maintain their cloud deployment. Understanding the details of the various ways to deploy would require another course. Instead, we’re going to follow a different, simpler path.

Heroku

Here, we use Heroku, an easy path to getting on the cloud. It’s like a rocket ship with training wheels. Like the other cloud solutions, it has a free tier that we can experiment with. And, like the other solutions, we can’t build a serious web application on the free tier. However, Heroku is designed to work with Git, which we’ve been using all along. In principle, we just push our Git repository to Heroku and it will launch. It’s aware of all the major web frameworks, for example, Flask, across a wide variety of programming languages. Since our goal is to go from zero to deployed as directly as possible, Heroku is the best choice.