To get Heroku gives you, you'd need to set up EB, RDS (with performance insights), CloudWatch (for logs and metrics), Code Pipeline (don't remember if EB supports GitHub pushes). If you use the heroku run command, you'll need to set up a jump box with SSH keys properly configured inside your VPC with DB access.

All this literally takes one click with Heroku.

Even though it’s not considered best practice to tie your RDS with your EB stack, part of the wizard for EB is setting up a database and it will create your RDS cluster and the security groups for you. It also automatically sets up your CloudWatch logs. EB can use Github.

Again, I’m far from a dev ops expert, but I cringe at how much EB (and Heroku) does that’s magic and I would much rather use CodeStar with the templates that create a standard CodeBuild/Code Deploy/CodePipeline/CloudFormation set up, but I am comparing like for like.

I’ve never deployed anything to Azure but I have used VSTS (aka Azure Devops) with various combinations of hosted builds, on site builds with agents on the build servers and deployment servers and that’s even easier than AWS’s offerings. Even if the GUI setup would make a real Devops person cringe.

Yes I realize Heroku for all intents and purposes is just another managed service that sits on top of AWS and that you can even buy Heroku services from AWS Marketplace for consolidated billing (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=0112b5d...)

I’m also not arguing not to use Heroku just because it cost more. We always choose a managed service over having to manage things ourself even going as far as preferring Fargate even though regular EC2 based ECS would be cheaper.

But, I haven’t seen anything that Heroku gives you that couldn’t be duplicated with EB or if you need a more traditional approach a CodeStar generated template.