Heroku Alternative: Deploy to Your Own Cloud with AZIN

AZIN is a Heroku alternative that deploys your code to your own Google Cloud account. Same push-to-deploy workflow Heroku popularized, but your infrastructure lives in a GCP project you control — not on a platform that stopped building new features. Data last verified: March 2026.

#What happened to Heroku

Salesforce transitioned Heroku to a "sustaining engineering model" on February 6, 2026. The platform receives security patches and stability fixes. No new features. Enterprise contracts are no longer sold to new customers. Fir generation, Heroku AI, and next-gen Postgres — all frozen before reaching general availability.

Heroku still works. Credit-card customers can keep using it with no pricing changes. But for any team planning beyond the next quarter, building on a platform with no roadmap is a liability.

#What Heroku developers actually need

After Heroku's sustain announcement, developers migrating away consistently cite the same requirements. Not everyone wants Kubernetes. Not everyone wants to manage Terraform. What they want is what Heroku gave them — minus the parts that broke.

Push-to-deploy that works. Connect a repo, push code, see it live. Heroku's buildpacks handled this. The replacement needs to match that speed without demanding a Dockerfile or CI pipeline.

Managed databases without the markup. Heroku Postgres Standard 0 costs $50/mo for 4 GB (as of March 2026). The underlying AWS RDS instance it runs on costs a fraction of that. Developers want managed databases at cloud-provider prices, not PaaS-markup prices.

No more vendor lock-in. Heroku runs on AWS, but you never see the AWS resources. If Heroku disappears, you start over. The next platform should let you walk away without losing your infrastructure.

A team that ships. Heroku went years without meaningful feature releases before the official freeze. Developers want a platform that actively improves — preview environments, autoscaling, observability — not one coasting on 2015-era capabilities.

#How AZIN addresses each requirement

Auto-detection instead of buildpacks. AZIN uses Railpack — an open-source, zero-config builder that detects your language and framework across 13+ stacks. Push your code, Railpack figures out the rest. If you prefer a custom Dockerfile, that works too.

Your cloud, your prices. AZIN deploys to GKE Autopilot in your GCP account. Your database is Cloud SQL, billed directly by Google. No middleman markup. GKE Autopilot's first cluster is free — you pay only for the compute your pods actually use.

Infrastructure you own. Every resource AZIN creates — load balancers, Cloud SQL instances, GKE workloads — lives in your GCP project. Open the Google Cloud Console and see them. If you ever leave AZIN, your infrastructure stays.

Active development. Preview environments, horizontal autoscaling, a visual service graph, AI-assisted infrastructure management, and a changeset system that stages infrastructure changes before applying them. AWS support is on our roadmap.

#Heroku vs AZIN at a glance

For a deeper breakdown of every feature difference, see the full AZIN vs Heroku comparison. For a side-by-side cost analysis, see the PaaS pricing comparison.

#Migrating from Heroku to AZIN

Heroku's concepts map directly to AZIN. Dynos become web services or workers. Heroku Postgres becomes Cloud SQL. Config vars become environment variables. Procfiles are replaced by Railpack auto-detection or a Dockerfile.

The migration path:

# 1. Export your Heroku database
heroku pg:backups:capture --app your-app
heroku pg:backups:download --app your-app
 
# 2. Connect your repo to AZIN Console
#    (GitHub integration — same connect-and-deploy flow)
 
# 3. Import your database into Cloud SQL
gcloud sql import sql your-instance gs://your-bucket/latest.dump

Run both environments in parallel until your new deployment is verified. Switch DNS. Decommission Heroku. Most teams complete this in a few hours for a standard web app with Postgres.

#When Heroku still makes sense

Heroku remains functional for existing apps where migration cost outweighs the risk of staying. Specifically:

• Salesforce ecosystem integrations using Heroku Connect. No direct equivalent exists on other platforms.
• Legacy apps in maintenance mode that need security patches but no new features — Heroku's sustaining model actually matches this use case.
• Teams locked into multi-year Enterprise contracts already in place. Existing contracts can still be renewed.

If your app falls outside these categories, the calculus is different. Building on a platform with no roadmap means accumulating technical debt against a deadline you cannot see. The longer you wait, the more config drift and institutional knowledge loss complicate eventual migration.

Heroku is a trademark of Salesforce, Inc. AZIN is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Salesforce. Information in this article is accurate as of March 2026 based on publicly available documentation and product announcements. Features and pricing are subject to change. If any information is inaccurate, contact us and we will update it promptly.