At first, building on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud may seem like an excellent choice. It provides tons of flexibility, allows you to scale your application quickly, and puts you in control of your application’s infrastructure.

However, as Benjamin Parker once said, “with great power comes great responsibility.” The resource demands of managing all of that infrastructure make it very difficult for businesses attempting to bring an application online quickly. The time and expense of laying the foundation could exhaust your budget and your schedule before your developers have an opportunity to write the first line of new code. Why? Because managing infrastructure is a discipline in its own right and expecting your developers to do it in addition to their regular development work may be too much.

Who Will Be Your Provider?

Just selecting an infrastructure provider requires substantial research and a deep understanding of how your application will be utilized. After choosing a provider, each aspect of the configuration process is a decision point. Some answers will come easily while others will require additional research and forecasting to ensure that your infrastructure budget is optimized.

Finally, with your infrastructure in place, your team can begin the work of developing the application. However, should something unexpected occur, their attention could again be divided between managing the things that keep your application alive and building the app itself.

In most cases, businesses elect to build directly on top of an infrastructure provider, like AWS, because they believe that it provides the only road to scalability – that building on a PaaS (platform-as-a-service) will limit their ability to meet a significant boost in demand when (IF) the app goes viral.

However, the trade-off is a significant upfront investment in both time and resources. Developing the infrastructure on which your application will be built could mean delaying your launch and cost substantial market share. It can also mean that your development budget is increased, not only because of the additional time required in the development phase but also because of the new skillsets that must be supported in-house to build and manage infrastructure.

Skipping the Infrastructure Question

Building on a platform-as-a-service, such as Heroku, eliminates many of these concerns. Heroku provides a quick path to application development and allows you to utilize the talent you already have in-house it also readily scalable and can support large user bases. Because Heroku is built on AWS, security, and reliability come standard and your application enjoys the same infrastructure benefits as giants like Netflix, Kellogg’s, and Dow Jones.

Heroku’s healthy app ecosystem gets your application up and running quickly. Within the Heroku Elements Marketplace, there are hundreds of add-ons that allow developers to bolt-on services like marketing campaign management, distributed object storage, image recognition, email servers, and more. This means that your development team will not spend time building out these standard tools and can get right into developing the unique aspects of your application.

Heroku also supports a variety of development languages including Java, PHP, Python, Scala, Clojure, and more. This allows your application to integrate with other tools smoothly and keeps your development team coding in their language of choice.

For Salesforce users, building a custom application on Heroku comes with the bonus of full integration. Applications built on Heroku fully integrate with the Force.com platform. This means that Heroku-based applications are not subject to API call limits of Salesforce and can exist entirely outside of Salesforce while continuing to leverage the data stored within Salesforce. For many businesses, this makes Heroku the ideal platform for building applications that integrate disparate systems and solve common business challenges.

Ready to see how Heroku can ease your development burden and get your application to market faster? Contact the Heroku / Salesforce development experts at RadialSpark for a free consultation. We will evaluate your project and provide you with best-build recommendations.