>I found this annoying at first along with not being able to save files to the server. However, Heroku is forcing you to automate server setup so servers can be

>I found this annoying at first along with not being able to save files to the server. However, Heroku is forcing you to automate server setup so servers can be restarted, destroyed and created without losing data or functionality. If you allow SSHing in to install software and storing files on the server, you're probably going to get some nasty surprises when you need to recreate the server or add more servers for example. The point the author was making was that automating the installation of custom software on Heroku sucks and that you can't SSH in to debug issues that only occur in the Heroku environment and can't be reproduced locally. Nowhere did the author say they were SSHing in with the intention of installing custom software. The author is using Docker to create images that contain the OS, the custom software, and the app itself. These images are then loaded onto EC2 instances by Chef and the application is run. There's no manual installation. Even if the author didn't use Docker, there are a lot of ways to automate server setup with AWS. Anyone seriously using AWS for production software is automating server setup. This isn't some kind of Heroku specific concept.