Amazon DynamoDB vs. AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs. AWS Lambda

It’s great for server less and real-time applications. It would be great for gaming and mobile apps. However, if you need relational database and have fixed budget, do not use it. While budget can be managed, you need to be careful. Also this is not a tool for storing big data, there are other wide-column database types you could use for it ins the ad

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.

Incentivized

Lambda excels at event-driven, short-lived tasks, such as processing files or building simple APIs. However, it's less ideal for long-running, computationally intensive, or applications that rely on carrying the state between jobs. Cold starts and constant load can easily balloon the costs.

Incentivized

• To manage varying workloads, it enables users to increase capacity as necessary and decrease it as needed.
• Users can take advantage of its auto-scaling, in-memory caching, and backup without paying for the services of a database administrator.
• We can use it for low scale operations.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• No provisioning required - we don't have to pay anything upfront
• Serverless deployment - it gets executed only when request comes and we pay only for the time the request is getting executed
• Integrates well with AWS CloudWatch triggers so it is easy to setup scheduled tasks like cron jobs

Incentivized

• Cost model may not be easy to control and may lead to higher costs if not carefully planned
• Indexing may be a cost culprit when not planned, because it's not included on the data costs
• The Query Language may not fulfill everybody's expectations, as it has less features than those of competitors.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Developing test cases for Lambda functions can be difficult. For functions that require some sort of input it can be tough to develop the proper payload and event for a test.
• For the uninitiated, deploying functions with Infrastructure as Code tools can be a challenging undertaking.
• Logging the output of a function feels disjointed from running the function in the console. A tighter integration with operational logging would be appreciated, perhaps being able to view function logs from the Lambda console instead of having to navigate over to CloudWatch.
• Sometimes its difficult to determine the correct permissions needed for Lambda execution from other AWS services.

Incentivized

It's core to our business, we couldn't survive without it. We use it to drive everything from FTP logins to processing stories and delivering them to clients. It's reliable and easy to query from all of our pipeline services. Integration with things like AWS Lambda makes it easy to trigger events and run code whenever something changes in the database.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Functionally, DynamoDB has the features needed to use it. The interface is not as easy to use, which impacts its usability. Being familiar with AWS in general is helpful in understanding the interface, however it would be better if the interface more closely aligned with traditional tools for managing datastores.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I give it a seven is usability because it's AWS. Their UI's are always clunkier than the competition and their documentation is rather cumbersome. There's SO MUCH to dig through and it's a gamble if you actually end up finding the corresponding info if it will actually help. Like I said before, going to google with a specific problem is likely a better route because AWS is quite ubiquitous and chances are you're not the first to encounter the problem. That being said, using SAM (Serverless application model) and it's SAM Local environment makes running local instances of your Lambdas in dev environments painless and quite fun. Using Nodejs + Lambda + SAM Local + VS Code debugger = AWESOME.

Incentivized

It works very well across all the regions and response time is also very quick due to AWS's internal data transfer. Plus if your product requires HIPPA or some other regulations needs to be followed, you can easily replicate the DB into multiple regions and they manage all by it's own.

Incentivized

I have not had to contact support for this service, however I have had to contact AWS for other services and their support has been good.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Amazon consistently provides comprehensive and easy-to-parse documentation of all AWS features and services. Most development team members find what they need with a quick internet search of the AWS documentation available online. If you need advanced support, though, you might need to engage an AWS engineer, and that could be an unexpected (or unwelcome) expense.

Incentivized

- 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.

Incentivized

The only thing that can be compared to DynamoDB from the selected services can be Aurora. It is just that we use Aurora for High-Performance requirements as it can be 6 times faster than normal RDS DB. Both of them have served as well in the required scenario and we are very happy with most of the AWS services.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

AWS Lambda is good for short running functions, and ideally in response to events within AWS. Google App Engine is a more robust environment which can have complex code running for long periods of time, and across more than one instance of hardware. Google App Engine allows for both front-end and back-end infrastructure, while AWS Lambda is only for small back-end functions

Incentivized

I have taken one point away due to its size limits. In case the application requires queries, it becomes really complicated to read and write data. When it comes to extremely large data sets such as the case in my company, a third-party logistics company, where huge amount of data is generated on a daily basis, even though the scalability is good, it becomes difficult to manage all the data due to limits.

Incentivized

• Some developers see DynamoDB and try to fit problems to it, instead of picking the best solution for a given problem. This is true of any newer tool that people are trying to adopt.
• It has allowed us to add more scalability to some of our systems.
• As with any new technology there was a ramp up/rework phase as we learned best practices.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Positive - Only paying for when code is run, unlike virtual machines where you pay always regardless of processing power usage.
• Positive - Scalability and accommodating larger amounts of demand is much cheaper. Instead of scaling up virtual machines and increasing the prices you pay for that, you are just increasing the number of times your lambda function is run.
• Negative - Debugging/troubleshooting, and developing for lambda functions take a bit more time to get used to, and migrating code from virtual machines and normal processes to Lambda functions can take a bit of time.

Incentivized