Heroku vs Bluemix: Cloud Platforms Comparison and Evaluation

This report provides a comparative analysis of two Platform-as-a-Service (PAAS) cloud service providers: Heroku and IBM Bluemix. It evaluates their services, quality, design, and ease of application management. The report includes a "Hello world" application deployment example on both platforms, highlighting the differences in their development and deployment processes. Key aspects such as service offerings for smart applications, IOT, and AI, as well as the quality and navigation of the PaaS systems, are compared. The report concludes that while both platforms offer unique features, Bluemix generally outperforms Heroku in terms of deployment speed and ease of use, recommending Bluemix as a potentially superior choice for cloud service deployment.

Running head: CLOUD COLLABORATION
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Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Comparing Heroku with Bluemix...............................................................................................3
Description: Comparison and contrast with Bluemix......................................................................5
1. Service offered for smart application, IOT, AI.....................................................................5
2. Quality, design and navigation of the Paas system...............................................................5
3. Hello world application in Heroku.......................................................................................6
Hello world application in Bluemix............................................................................................8
How easy to manage the application in the context of the following........................................11
Recommendation.......................................................................................................................12
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................12
Reference.......................................................................................................................................13

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Introduction
Cloud services has proved to be of significant benefit and hence, is being adopted
globally. The mass demand of the deemed service has created huge competition in the cloud
service providers market and hence confusing the consumers. The devised report will shortlist
the cloud service provider and do a comparative analysis among two of them to determine the
most suitable service provider. One of the shortlisted subject is the IBM Bluemix cloud service
provider and the other will be shortlisted from the table that had been listed in the following
section.
The list of cloud service provider who offers PAAS to develop applications is followed.
PAAS Service Provider
Engine Yard
Red Hot OpenShift
Google App Engine
Heroku
Appfog
Windows Azure cloud services
Caspio

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Comparing Heroku with Bluemix
Heroku is a cloud platform as a service ranked 4th and the IBM’s cloud services provider
named Blumix ranked 11th in PAAS cloud. Though they both are similar PAAS service provider
there are several dissimilarities between them in terms of deployment.
Bluemix Heroku
Pros Heroku’s integration provides variety of add-ons
and it is easy for monitoring, source code hosting,
email and data storage.
It provides custom environment
that is suitable to develop and
run software.
cons It is affordable for small applications but charge
excessive amount to support more user in
application deployment.
Complex to implement like port
forwarding within PAAS
architecture.

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Add-ons supported in Heroku
Add-ons supported in Bluemix

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Description: Comparison and contrast with Bluemix
1. Service offered for smart application, IOT, AI
Hedroku basically based on a managed container system with integrated data services and a
powerful ecosystem for running modern apps and deploying. They provide services like IOT
software consultancies that support the development of data analytics, visualization solutions
and platform as well as integration into embedded systems. For this approaches the provide
services like Data services and Ecosystem, Heroku runtime, Heroku Developer experience
and heroku operational experience.
2. Quality, design and navigation of the Heroku system.
A dyno is same as a virtual UNIX container that is capable of run every type of process on
the dyno manifold (Coutermarsh, 2014). The dyno manifold is a process execution environment
capable execute several dynos that might cater to various client request. The following diagram
illustrate the design of Heroku.

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Dyno monifold
Logplex logging Infrastructure
Control
Structure
API
Enterprise
data
Queing Database Add-ons
mo
nito
r
Dyno 1 Dyno 2 Dyno 3
Routing
Http Router
Design of heroku system
3. Hello world application in Heroku
The node.js app

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Package.json

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Making a new Git folder. It uses Git as source control system.
Creating the Heroku app, and deploy by using Heroku CLI tool
Hello world application in Bluemix
In CF tool
Import files

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Push app to Bluemix
cf push <YOUR_APP_NAME> -m 128M -b https://github.com/ephoning/heroku-buildpack-
python.git
$ c:\CloudFoundry\hello-python-master>cf push hello-python-master -m 128M -b
https://github.com/ephoning/heroku-buildpack-python.git
Level of difficulty for development and deployment process of the cloud environment
Applications & codebase
Utilizing Heroku as a PAAS deployment environment not only impact the runtime
aspects of applications. It has a huge effect on development process too (Das, Usmani & Jain,
2015). The application’s codebase is used most of the times while developing an app in some

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form of subversion, git and mercurial. The difficulty is for developing an application more than
one version is often necessary.
Dependencies
Dependencies are must be isolated such as third-party libraries and plugins. There should be no
dependency on packages that already installed on Heroku runtime.
Configuration
An app configuration consist anything that vary under deploys such as production, developer
environments and staging. Such configuration should not be stored in the codebase.
Source:( Middleton & Schneeman, 2013)

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How easy to manage the application.
Allocate and upgrade resources like memory, space-
The experimental outcome demonstrations that the waiting time and improvement time of
processes can be reduced by algorithm while using Heroku. This algorithm proposed by Heroku
considered the time quantum to be dynamic. In Bluemix, it is easy to allocate free space to
extend partition in desk management. For this particular process, AOMEI assistant is helpful to
reparation hard drive.
Update/amend host URL, hosting data center and program/code of the application
In Bluemix, there is interface like Bluemix command Line Interface to push command for
developing an application. The bluemix app push command, the command copies all of the files
and directories from your current directory to Bluemix. Ensure that user have only the required
files in your application directory. Heroku also have plans to modify the time quantum further in
future (Kobylinski et al., 2014). Existing an auction mechanism which is market-driven, and
utilized to classify operators for the distribution of resources based on their expense aptitudes
also they have a suitable payment strategy based on client’s preferred services. One of the best
ways of resource allocation is online and offline auction mechanism.
Recommendation
The review of both the applications have revealed that both the considered service
providers offers some similar but unique offerings to the consumers. Though, after analyzing all
the factors, it can be concluded that Bluemix performance is far better than Heroku. It looks as if

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Bluemix might be a great stack up against Heroku (Gheith et al., 2016). The former leads the
latter in almost most the categories that the technologies have been evaluated that includes the
”hello world” app deployement along with the navigation, ease of use and others. Although it is
not possible to came up with a final option and cross-checked them. As the research conducted it
looks as if Bluemix exceeds, Heroku in features and capabilities (Hanjura, 2014). The most
Valuable part is the fast deployment while using Bluemix. This means the time to market is
improved without pain for developers. In case of using Heroku the pipelines intuitive is robust
and also the user experience could be better. Having to set up multiple apps, then a pipeline,
seems like an overkill on the amount of work to do.
Conclusion
For cloud service deployment there is numerous service provider is available in market.
Most of them work on same basis while the cost of services varies. The report has taken
consideration of varies factors to do a comparative analysis between them. The “hello world”
application has been deployed in both the considered PaaS service provider and determined that
the Bluemix leads its counterpart in the process. Hence, it can be stated that under this PAAS
service provider comparison IBM’ Bluemix is one of the most suitable provider available. In this
report the comparison between Bluemix and Heroku has been illustrate and can be concluded
that Bluemix provides more suitable services than Heroku.

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Reference
Coutermarsh, M. (2014). Heroku Cookbook. Packt Publishing Ltd.
Das, N. S., Usmani, M., & Jain, S. (2015, May). Implementation and performance evaluation of
sentiment analysis web application in cloud computing using IBM Blue mix.
In Computing, Communication & Automation (ICCCA), 2015 International Conference
on (pp. 668-673). IEEE.
Gheith, A., Rajamony, R., Bohrer, P., Agarwal, K., Kistler, M., Eagle, B. W., ... & Kaplinger, T.
(2016). Ibm bluemix mobile cloud services. IBM Journal of Research and
Development, 60(2-3), 7-1.
Hanjura, A. (2014). Heroku Cloud Application Development. Packt Publishing Ltd.
Kobylinski, K., Bennett, J., Seto, N., Lo, G., & Tucci, F. (2014, November). Enterprise
application development in the cloud with IBM Bluemix. In Proceedings of 24th Annual
International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering(pp. 276-279).
IBM Corp..
Middleton, N., & Schneeman, R. (2013). Heroku: Up and Running: Effortless Application
Deployment and Scaling. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.".