Heroku is a cloud-based [[PaaS]] (Platform-as-a-Service) that simplifies deploying—directly from repositories like GitHub—, scaling, and managing applications, like those written in Python, by abstracting infrastructure complexities and providing a platform to run software directly. Heroku is praised for its user-friendly interface and seamless integrations, but may be perceived as costlier at scale or less customizable than alternatives like AWS Elastic Beanstalk or Google App Engine. Integrates well with popular databases like PostgreSQL.