What’s the difference between AWS, Heroku, Docker, and Azure?

1. AWS

AWS has a whole bunch of tools for developers to deploy websites and apps without having to maintain their own server farm or data center like virtual instances (EC2) or file storage (S3). AWS is generally is the most popular set of deployment tools because of how powerful and prolific it is.

Amazon Web Services and its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service: Amazon EC2 virtual server instances come in a wide variety of CPU and memory configurations, feature full root access, and offer much better performance-per-dollar than Heroku.

1. Heroku

Heroku is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) product based on AWS, and is vastly different from Elastic Compute Cloud.

Heroku is way simpler to use than AWS Elastic Compute Cloud.

$ heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev

In short, Heroku vs AWS means Heroku vs Elastic Beanstalk.

1. Docker

Docker is different in that its a tool used when deploying applications. Docker essentially lets you compartmentalize your applications to deploy onto different machines/infastructures without having to worry about configuring prerequisites. For example, I use Docker to speed up deployment by wrapping my applications when I deploy to Digital Ocean (another hosting service).

1. Azure

However Azure is similar to AWS in that you have a variety of services for you to configure to develop your own infrastructure (lots of people use Azure too).