Heroku to AWS Migration Guide¶

A complete walkthrough for migrating from Heroku to AWS.

Overview¶

This guide covers migrating a typical Heroku application to AWS, including:

• Web dynos → ECS Fargate
• Postgres → Aurora
• Redis → ElastiCache
• Environment variables → Secrets Manager

Estimated time: 2-4 hours (vs. 2-3 months manually)

Prerequisites¶

• AWS CLI configured
• Heroku CLI logged in
• Terraform installed
• InfraIQ installed

Step 1: Scan Heroku¶

infraiq migrate scan heroku --app-name my-production-app --output scan.json

Review the scan results:

cat scan.json | jq '.services'

Step 2: Map to AWS¶

infraiq migrate map scan.json aws --output migration-plan.json

Review service mappings:

cat migration-plan.json | jq '.mappings'

Step 3: Generate Terraform¶

infraiq migrate generate migration-plan.json --output ./terraform

Step 4: Configure Variables¶

Edit terraform/terraform.tfvars:

# Database
db_password = "your-secure-password"

# Application secrets
environment_variables = {
  SECRET_KEY_BASE = "your-secret-key"
  # Copy from Heroku config vars
}

Step 5: Deploy Infrastructure¶

cd terraform
terraform init
terraform plan
terraform apply

Step 6: Migrate Database¶

Use DataIQ for zero-downtime migration:

infraiq dataiq migrate \
  --source $HEROKU_DATABASE_URL \
  --target $AWS_DATABASE_URL \
  --strategy blue-green

Step 7: Deploy Application¶

# Build and push Docker image
docker build -t my-app .
docker tag my-app:latest $ECR_REPO:latest
docker push $ECR_REPO:latest

# Update ECS service
aws ecs update-service --cluster my-cluster --service my-service --force-new-deployment

Step 8: DNS Cutover¶

1. Update DNS to point to AWS load balancer
2. Monitor for errors
3. Scale down Heroku after validation

Step 9: Validate¶

infraiq verify scan --provider aws --output post-migration.json
infraiq verify analyze post-migration.json

Rollback Plan¶

If issues occur:

1. Switch DNS back to Heroku
2. Heroku app should still be running
3. Investigate and fix AWS issues
4. Retry cutover

Cost Comparison¶

Next Steps¶

• VerifyIQ — Ongoing security monitoring
• ComplyIQ — SOC2 compliance