scorebot

Generally speaking Amazon gives you much more control than Heroku. With great power comes great responsibility. That means that with the increased power comes increased configuration steps. Amazon performs optimizations (both technical and billing) based on what tasks you're performing. You configure web or worker environments separately and deploy to them separately. Heroku does this for you but in some cases you may not want to deploy both at once. Amazon leaves that configuration up to you.

Now, don't get me wrong, you might see this as a feature of a heroku, but in advanced configurations you might have entire teams working on and redeploying workers independent from your web tier. This means that the default on Amazon is basically that you set up two completely separate apps that might happen to share source code (but don't have to).

Basically the answer to your question is no, there is not something that will allow you to do what you're asking in as simple a manor as with Heroku. That doesn't mean it is impossible, it just means you need to set up your environments yourself instead of Heroku doing it for you.

For more info see:

Worker "dyno" in AWS Elastic Beanstalk

http://colintoh.com/blog/configure-worker-for-aws-elastic-beanstalk

You should be using the endpoint DNS name supplied by RDS instead of an explicit IP address. That DNS name may resolve to a different IP address internally in AWS (where Heroku is running) versus remotely on your local server. You should be using that DNS name anyway in case your RDS server has a fail-over event, at which point the IP address is subject to change.

I assume you have the "Publicly Accessible" flag enabled on the RDS instance since you can connect from your local computer. You also need to check the security group assigned to the RDS instance. If you only allowed your local IP address in the security group, then connections from Heroku would be blocked.