What exactly is Heroku?

Question

I just started learning Ruby on rails and I was wondering what Heroku really is? I know that its a cloud that helps us to avoid using servers? When do we actually use it?

Answer 1

As I see it, it is a scalable administrated web hosting service, ready to grow in any sense so you don't have to worry about it.

It's not useful for a normal PHP web application, because there are plenty of web hosting services with ftp over there for a simple web without scalability needs, but if you need something bigger Heroku or something similar is what you need.

It is exposed as a service via a command line tool so you can write scripts to automate your deployments. Anyway it is pretty similar to other web hosting services with Git enabled, but Heroku makes it simpler.

That's its thing, to make the administration stuff simpler to you, so it saves you time. But I'm not sure, as I'm just starting with it!

A nice introduction of how it works in the official documentation is:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/how-heroku-works