Similar to an Azure worker role, does amazon web services or Heroku offer a service that would be useful for a worker process or recurring worker role. For example, an hourly job that would download a file from a url and parse it into a database or insert it into a dynamo db.
Ideally it would have a status dashboard web interface that would let you see the status of jobs, errors in jobs, etc...
Heroku has a concept of 'worker dynos' to which you can assign to process background jobs, or the other tasks you had asked about.
More information:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/background-jobs-queueing