Sure, but Heroku also manages all your build and deployment steps. Migrating away from Heroku is as easy as pushing your code somewhere else, then deleting the

Sure, but Heroku also manages all your build and deployment steps. Migrating away from Heroku is as easy as pushing your code somewhere else, then deleting the app on Heroku. Ideally all of these build and deployment steps are automated for you, because let's face it, most web applications and APIs have very, very similar hosting requirements. Maybe I don't really understand the concept of lock-in. I've never felt "locked in" to anything on AWS, unless you're talking about contracts for reserved instances.