Adobe Experience Platform vs. AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs. BlueConic

The Adobe Experience Platform is well suited for companies that are maturing or have matured in their digital offerings and are looking for very sophisticated tools to elevate to the next level. It's also for well resourced teams, both financially and head count to take advantage of the deep functionality and integrations.

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I have been using AWS Elastic Beanstalk for more than 5 years, and it has made our life so easy and hassle-free. Here are some scenarios where it excels -

• I have been using different AWS services like EC2, S3, Cloudfront, Serverless, etc. And Elastic Beanstalk makes our lives easier by tieing each service together and making the deployment a smooth process.
• N number of integrations with different CI/CD pipelines make this most engineer's favourite service.
• Scalability & Security comes with the service, which makes it the absolute perfect product for your business.

Personally, I haven't found any situations where it's not appropriate for the use cases it can be used. The pricing is also very cost-effective.

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Where you are looking for agility and product placement - this is a great product. We were able to move $750k in product in a month due to the pure agility in offering more targetted discounts to users at the right moment. If you use the software correctly - this is like giving your core website experience steriods to offer users the right products at the right time. This shouldn't, however, replace comprehensive funnel testing. Think of it more like hyper offer-management service

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• Host online/offline data with common IDs
• Ease of profile activation to destinations
• Flexibility around how many sources and destinations can be used to move data

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• Getting a project set up using the console or CLI is easy compared to other [computing] platforms.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports a variety of programming languages so teams can experiment with different frameworks but still use the same compute platform for rapid prototyping.
• Common application architectures can be referenced as patterns during project [setup].
• Multiple environments can be deployed for an application giving more flexibility for experimentation.

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• BlueConic's technology and interface is second to none. They excel at taking potentially difficult tasks and making them easy for users to accomplish without having to stretch the platform's limits or reach out to customer support.
• The way BlueConic integrates with websites almost seems like magic; by placing a single tag you're able to track almost everything and deploy website personalization.
• BlueConic releases frequent updates to the platform, like new integrations to other platforms and different tools for tracking data.

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• the slowness of the website sometimes
• the structure

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• Limited to the frameworks and configurations that AWS supports. There is no native way to use Elastic Beanstalk to deploy a Go application behind Nginx, for example.
• It's not always clear what's changed on an underlying system when AWS updates an EB stack; the new version is announced, but AWS does not say what specifically changed in the underlying configuration. This can have unintended consequences and result in additional work in order to figure out what changes were made.

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• They should have the ability to port data beyond O&O properties. This is likely more complex than I make it seem, but a deal w/ a DMP to be able to do so would likely solve the issue.
• Could have some more "out of the box" APIs.
• WOuld be great if they had in-house consultants that could come and help set-up best practices with your other existing partnerships (this would be a HUGE ask though; places like Salesforce charge thousands for such services).

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It is useful when executed properly

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As our technology grows, it makes more sense to individually provision each server rather than have it done via beanstalk. There are several reasons to do so, which I cannot explain without further diving into the architecture itself, but I can tell you this. With automation, you also loose the flexibility to morph the system for your specific needs. So if you expect that in future you need more customization to your deployment process, then there is a good chance that you might try to do things individually rather than use an automation like beanstalk.

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Overall I really like the Adobe Experience Cloud after a couple years of figuring out various tools. They are extremely powerful. The time commitment to learn them is high since it's not a tool you can easily begin using without much training.

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The overall usability is good enough, as far as the scaling, interactive UI and logging system is concerned, could do a lot better when it comes to the efficiency, in case of complicated node logics and complicated node architectures. It can have better software compatibility and can try to support collaboration with more softwares

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I think without a bit of training and knowledge it would be hard to walk right into a role or a task inside of BlueConic - it is kind of hard to comprehend everything that is available and all of the options. The language inside of BlueConic is also very different than other things in the industry, so it was hard to understand what it would line up with.

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Adobe has support at all levels and for each product but beyond tool questions you'll often be told they can help but it requires some paid consulting hours. So you either hire Adobe consultants or find 3rd part consultants who know their products well.

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As I described earlier it has been really cost effective and really easy for fellow developers who don't want to waste weeks and weeks into learning and manually deploying stuff which basically takes month to create and go live with the Minimal viable product (MVP). With AWS Beanstalk within a week a developer can go live with the Minimal viable product easily.

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- Do as many experiments as you can before you commit on using beanstalk or other AWS features. - Keep future state in mind. Think through what comes next, and if that is technically possible to do so. - Always factor in cost in terms of scaling. - We learned a valuable lesson when we wanted to go multi-region, because then we realized many things needs to change in code. So if you plan on using this a lot, factor multiple regions.

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We are more integrated with other Adobe products and so it was an easy decision

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We also use Heroku and it is a great platform for smaller projects and light Node.js services, but we have found that in terms of cost, the Elastic Beanstalk option is more affordable for the projects that we undertake. The fact that it sits inside of the greater AWS Cloud offering also compels us to use it, since integration is simpler. We have also evaluated Microsoft Azure and gave up trying to get an extremely basic implementation up and running after a few days of struggling with its mediocre user interface and constant issues with documentation being outdated. The authentication model is also badly broken and trying to manage resources is a pain. One cannot compare Azure with anything that Amazon has created in the cloud space since Azure really isn't a mature platform and we are always left wanting when we have to interface with it.

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BlueConic is more lightweight and allows for more unique experiences at the same time. Again - this isn't meant to perfect the core UX of your site, but sit on top to deliver unique experiences to control offer management and close rates.

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• More leads from profile activations and lookalike audiences
• Better understanding of our data with CJA
• Better journey orchestration using AJO
• Higher conversions and sales due to better understanding of customer pain points

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• till now we had not Calculated ROI as the project is still evolving and we had to keep on changing the environment implementation
• it meets our purpose of quick deployment as compared to on-premises deployment
• till now we look good as we also controlled our expenses which increased suddenly in the middle of deployment activity

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• BlueConic has lead to a deeper understanding of how customers engage with our content

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