Heroku Explained — What a PaaS Actually Does For You
Heroku costs several times what the same app costs on AWS. It's also the reason a two-person team can ship on a Tuesday instead of hiring a platform engineer. Here's what a PaaS actually does for you, and when that trade is worth making.
What you'll learn:
• The problem: running servers is undifferentiated toil
• What Heroku is — PaaS sitting between IaaS and SaaS
• Dynos — the lightweight, ephemeral containers your app runs in
• git push to deploy — the developer experience that made Heroku famous
• Buildpacks & slugs — how your source becomes a runnable bundle
• The Procfile — declaring your web and worker processes
• Config vars — 12-factor configuration in the environment
• Add-ons — managed databases and services, attached in one command
• Scaling and the EPHEMERAL FILESYSTEM (the #1 gotcha)
• When to use Heroku — and when to reconsider
Practice these out loud with mock interviews, spaced repetition, and 500+ curated questions at https://prepforge.net
Chapters:
00:00 Heroku Explained
00:43 The Problem
01:24 1. What Is Heroku
02:10 2. Dynos
02:55 3. Deploying with Git
03:33 4. Buildpacks & Slugs
04:19 5. The Procfile
04:55 6. Config Vars
05:37 7. Add-ons
06:17 8. Scaling & the Ephemeral Filesystem
07:09 9. When to Use Heroku
07:58 You're Heroku-Ready
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