The Heroku Platform, now from Salesforce, is a platform-as-a-service based on
a managed container system, with integrated data services and ecosystem for deploying modern apps. It takes an app-centric
approach for software delivery, integrated with developer tools and
workflows. It’s three main tool are: Heroku Developer Experience (DX), Heroku
Operational Experience (OpEx), and Heroku Runtime.
Heroku Developer Experience (DX)
Developers deploy directly from tools like…
$85
per month
SAP Business Technology Platform
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is the company's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, that brings together intelligent enterprise applications with database and data management, analytics, integration and extension capabilities into one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments, including hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications.
Heroku is very well suited for startups looking to get a server stack up and running quickly. There is little to no overhead when managing your instances. However, you'll need a background in basic DevOps or system management to make sure everything is set up correctly. In addition, it's easy to accidentally go crazy on pricing. Make sure you're only creating the server instances you need to run the base application and set up an auto-scaler plugin to handle peaks.
SAP Business Technology Platform offers to run the cloud application without worries about availability and accessibility. This is helping us to enable the services that are really suited for us. For example, We have Cloud Identity Services that offer the capability to manage identity directory and also Identity provisioning functionality. Both functionalities helped us to manage the SSO and also enabled the auto-provisioning.
Heroku has a very simple deployment model, making it easy to get your application up-and-running with minimal effort. We can focus on our efforts the unique aspects of our application.
The robust add-on marketplace makes it easy to try out new approaches with minimal effort and investment -- and when we settle on a solution, we can easily scale it.
Heroku's support is quite good -- their staff is quite technical and willing to get into the weeds to diagnose even complicated problems.
Services are operated by SAP with outstanding support, always giving a helping hand even if it is custom code or solution provided on the platform
Services are easily connectable via standard approach to our backend SAP systems in SAP Rise/HEC
Secure access using identities from our existing identity management helping us to safeguard data security from within SAP systems up to custom frontend applications
Large price jumps between certain resource tiers (2x Dyno for $50 per month versus Performance Dyno for $250). Free Postgres next jumps to $50 per month.
Marketing/Branding to non-technical stakeholders. As the years pass, I've had to fight more to convince stakeholders on the value of Heroku over AWS.
Improve Buildpack documentation. This is one area where Heroku's documentation is fairly confusing.
Heroku is easy to use, services a ton of functions for you out of the box, and provides a means to get a software product off the ground and managed quickly and easily. The tools provide allows a small to medium size org to move very quickly. The CLI tools provided make managing an entire technical infrastructure simple.
Seamless integration with external system and dashboard to monitor the data flow and analysis are very essential for the business. The way the product is designed and modelled lead to minimum business disruptions. Adopting to the new and modern technology was easy. Keeping the central system as clean and adopting project bases development are advantages.
Easy to use web based console and easy to use command line tools; deployment is done directly from a GIT repository. What more could you ask for? The one thing that keeps me from giving it a 10 is that custom build packs are almost incomprehensible. We used one for a while because we needed cairo graphics processing. Fortunately, I was able to figure out a different way to do what we needed so that we could get off the custom build pack.
Overall, I feel it is build toward as an SAP centric platform. Which is very proper direction for SAP as it is their competitive advantage. However, as a customer, I like to see the cost of the services to come down with the advance of underlay hardware capabilities. Licensing model can be streamlined for easier budgeting and consumption.
Heroku availability correlates pretty strongly to AWS US EAST availability. We had a couple of times where there was a Heroku-specific issue but not for the last 7-8 months.
I've used it for many years without facing any major problem. It's not hard at all to get used to it, it's documentation is outstanding and simple. We are close to 2020 and I don't think most of the existing companies or startups should still face old problems such as wasting time deploying code and calculate computing resources.
I give it 9/10 because its customer support team is responsive and knowledgeable, providing clear guidance on complex issues. We contacted them several times; I want to give one example. When we had a problem with third-party integration, we reached out to them about the issue, and they provided a tailored solution for this.
Training material in Developers Community or from Learning hub are really good... also most of the time we route through Discovery center... so materials provided by SAP is really good.
Be ready to pay a bit more than expected in the beginning if you're migrating from a big server. The application is probably not ready for the change and you have to keep improving it with time.
It's also important to consider that you can't save anything to the disc as it will be lost when your application restarts, so you have to think about using something like S3.
1. Sometimes the licensing doesn’t make sense, e.g., Difficult to understand the license for ABAP cloud runtime. 2. When SAP Business Technology Platform workflow cost is very high but process automation which offers more features has less cost.
Heroku is the more expensive option for hosting compared to some of the cloud platforms we investigated, but it's worth it for us because of the plug-and-play nature of Heroku deployment. We can be up and running in a few minutes and know with precision how much it will cost us each month to run the application, unlike Amazon Web Services where you have to go to great pains to configure it correctly or else you might end up with a shocking monthly bill. Overall, spending the time to configure Amazon Web Services or one of its competitors is likely the more affordable and powerful choice, because you have control over so many specifics of the configuration. But it also requires the burden of continuing to maintain and update your AWS instance, whereas with Heroku they take care of security fixes and platform upgrades. It's a great service and we are happy to pay the extra cost for the value-adds Heroku provides.
SAP Concur allows our staff to book, reimburse and remain spend audit compliant. Our Concur system takes feed from Workday and interacts with Credit card vendor. It also makes posting to Accounting and does clearing. SAP Business Technology Platform helped in establishing connection with all these different tools in real time. It helps in getting paid to the card service provider through our Bank through interface, which is built on SAP Business Technology Platform.
Infusing Generative AI capabilities easily into our solutions with existing talent with minimal learning curve, has been very impactful. We have been able resolve several challenges for our clients with AI capabilities, that we could not, previously.
Integration Suite is quite extensive in capabilities for bringing together the IT landscape into a single ecosystem.
