Streamlining Your Migration: How to Efficiently Move from Heroku to AWS with Minimal Downtime

Forget the hype that migration means chaos. This guide flips the narrative by showing how to strategically plan a Heroku to AWS move that safeguards uptime and data integrity, empowering founders to confidently own their infrastructure transition.

As your startup grows, the ease and simplicity of Heroku can become a double-edged sword. While it offers fantastic developer experience and rapid deployment early on, the platform’s costs and limitations often balloon as you scale. Many companies realize that moving to AWS is the natural next step to gain infrastructure control, customize their environment, and ultimately reduce long-term expenses.

However, migrating from a PaaS like Heroku to a more hands-on infrastructure on AWS can feel intimidating — especially when you’re concerned about downtime, data loss, and operational headaches. The good news? With the right approach, you can replicate your environment and shift traffic smoothly with minimal disruption.

In this post, I’ll walk you through a practical, step-by-step strategy to move your app and data from Heroku to AWS, keeping your users happy and your engineers sane.

Step 1: Audit Your Current Heroku Setup Thoroughly

Before you do anything, take stock of your existing Heroku environment:

• List all Heroku Dynos, Add-ons, and external services. Heroku Add-ons like Postgres, Redis, or Elasticsearch will need proper migration strategies.
• Evaluate your buildpacks, environment variables, and config settings. These will have to be replicated in AWS via EC2, ECS, or serverless setups.
• Understand traffic patterns and workflows. Identify peak periods and offline windows to strategically plan your cutover.

Example: If your app uses Heroku Postgres with 100GB of data, you’ll need to plan a secure dump/migration strategy that minimizes downtime.

Step 2: Design Your AWS Architecture Based on Your Needs

Heroku abstracts infrastructure, but on AWS you own everything — which is powerful but requires planning:

• Decide the best AWS service fit:
  • ECS/Fargate or EKS for containerized apps
  • EC2 for VM-style control
  • Lambda for serverless functions
• Set up managed databases: Amazon RDS (Postgres, MySQL) or Aurora for relational data.
• Plan networking: VPCs, security groups, load balancers (ALB or NLB).
• Automate infrastructure: Use IaC tools like Terraform or CloudFormation for repeatable setups.

For example, if your Heroku app runs primarily on a web dyno with Redis caching, you might plan for:

• ECS cluster running Docker containers of your app behind an Application Load Balancer
• Amazon RDS Postgres for your database
• Amazon ElastiCache Redis cluster for caching

Step 3: Set Up a Parallel Environment on AWS

Don’t “cut and run.” Instead, build your AWS environment alongside Heroku.

• Deploy your app containers or EC2 instances
• Configure your database on RDS and begin seeding it with initial data dumps
• Set environment variables and secrets securely (AWS Secrets Manager or Parameter Store)
• Set up monitoring and logs (CloudWatch or third-party tools)

By doing this, you’ll have a fully functional app ready for final testing while your current Heroku environment continues serving traffic.

Step 4: Migrate Your Data With Minimal Disruption

Database migration is the trickiest part and an area ripe for downtime if not handled carefully.

Example approach for Postgres:

1. Initial bulk data dump: Use pg_dump on Heroku Postgres and restore to AWS RDS.
2. Enable logical replication or use a database sync tool (like pglogical, AWS Database Migration Service) to replicate ongoing changes.
3. Run your app in AWS with read-only or limited write capacity in parallel if useful.

For Redis or other data stores, consider similar dump-and-restore or replication strategies.

Step 5: Gradually Redirect Traffic

Once your AWS environment is tested and data is in sync, it’s time to switch users over:

• Update your DNS records with a low TTL (time to live) so requests resolve quickly to your new AWS app IP.
• Alternatively, use a CDN or a DNS failover provider to gradually move traffic.
• Consider a blue-green deployment approach where Heroku is “green” and AWS is “blue,” then switch DNS to blue.

During this time, monitor logs, error rates, and user metrics closely.

Step 6: Finalize and Decommission Heroku

When confident all traffic and data writes have moved over to AWS:

• Disable Heroku dynos and add-ons
• Keep backups for safety but set a sunset date
• Notify your team and update documentation to reflect infrastructure changes

Congratulations, you now own your infrastructure — more control, potentially lower costs, and a scalable foundation for growth!

Key Tips to Remember

• Test early and test often. Use AWS staging environments before touching production.
• Monitor comprehensively. AWS CloudWatch, Datadog, or New Relic can alert on anomalies immediately.
• Communicate with your team and users. Downtime transparency builds trust.
• Automate provisioning with IaC—this saves countless hours on future tweaks.

Migrating from Heroku to AWS is more manageable than it appears if you approach it methodically. While Heroku’s managed environment is fantastic for rapid prototyping, AWS gives you the power and flexibility you need at scale.

With proper planning, data synchronization, and traffic shifting strategies, you can flip the migration story away from chaos towards an orderly, minimally disruptive transition — ensuring your startup’s infrastructure can confidently keep pace with your ambitions.

If you found this guide helpful or have specific questions about your migration journey, drop a comment below! I’m happy to share more detailed tooling tips or scripts I’ve used in my past migrations. Happy migrating!