Navigating the Clouds
My Journey Migrating from Heroku to AWS
In the spirit of continuing to reflect on my journey as the CTO of Booksloth, I want to explore one of our key decision-making philosophies that guided us through our initial growth stages. It’s about choosing practicality over popularity, especially when it comes to technology selection. In our startup’s early days, we faced numerous challenges that required immediate solutions. Rather than being influenced by every new tech trend, we focused on leveraging familiar tools that offered the quickest and most reliable path to solving our problems.
This approach was particularly true when we decided to host our backend on Heroku, a choice driven by its user-friendliness. We ran our backend services on Heroku for about 2–3 years, during which we acquired our first 3,000 users and thoroughly tested our product-market fit with our young adult readers audience. This period allowed us to grow and stabilize without the immediate need to migrate, demonstrating the effectiveness of Heroku in our early stages.
Heroku served us well in our early stages with its simplicity and ease of use. However, as we scaled, we needed more control and flexibility, especially regarding cost-efficiency, scalability, and customization. AWS promised these, with its vast array of services and granular control over the…
