Sure it's not hard to spin up a Node process on a VM, but the abstractions Heroku provides are pretty nice: "git push" to deploy, Procfile to define process ty

Sure it's not hard to spin up a Node process on a VM, but the abstractions Heroku provides are pretty nice: "git push" to deploy, Procfile to define process types, a simple command line tool for tailing logs, scaling processes, set environment variables to configure, etc. Plus you need to know a bunch of stuff about sysadmining to properly secure the server, stay on top of security patches, etc.