Heroku is the first of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers that this chapter will cover. PaaS is a service given to web developers that allows them to host their websites on a platform that is controlled and maintained by someone else. At the cost of some freedom, you gain assurances that your website will automatically scale with the number of users your site has, with no extra work on your part. Using PaaS utilities may, however, tend to be more expensive than running your own servers.
Heroku is a PaaS utility that aims to provide ease of use to web developers by hooking into already existing tools, and not requiring any large changes in the app. Heroku works by reading a file named Procfile, which contains commands that your Heroku dyno (basically a virtual machine sitting on a server) will run. Before we begin, you will need a Heroku account. If...