Amazon Elastic Transcoder vs. AWS CloudFormation

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
The Amazon Elastic Transcoder from AWS is a cloud-based media transcoding service available to AWS users which is priced on the volume of media transcoded by minute and the media's resolution. The service is scalable and anticipates transcoding of very large files or high volumes of files.
$0
per minute
AWS CloudFormation
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run an application. Users don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work.…
$0
Pricing
Amazon Elastic TranscoderAWS CloudFormation
Editions & Modules
Audio Only
$0.0045
per minute
Less than 720p
$0.015
per minute
720p and above
$0.03
per minute
Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account
$0.00
Handler Operation
$0.0009
per handler operation
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic TranscoderAWS CloudFormation
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAmazon Elastic Transcoder offers a monthly free usage tier. The free tier consists of: 20 minutes of free audio-only output per month, 20 minutes of free SD output per month and 10 minutes of free HD output per month. Once you exceed the number of minutes in this free usage tier, you will be charged at the prevailing rates.There is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with resource providers in the following namespaces: AWS::*, Alexa::*, and Custom::*. In this case you pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation as if you created them manually. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no required upfront commitments. When you use resource providers with AWS CloudFormation outside the namespaces mentioned above, you incur charges per handler operation. Handler operations are create, update, delete, read, or list actions on a resource.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic TranscoderAWS CloudFormation
Features
Amazon Elastic TranscoderAWS CloudFormation
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
9.2
3 Ratings
12% above category average
AWS CloudFormation
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.53 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools9.53 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls8.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation9.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Configuration Management
Comparison of Configuration Management features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
-
Ratings
AWS CloudFormation
8.2
2 Ratings
2% above category average
Infrastructure Automation00 Ratings8.52 Ratings
Automated Provisioning00 Ratings8.52 Ratings
Parallel Execution00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Node Management00 Ratings7.52 Ratings
Reporting & Logging00 Ratings7.52 Ratings
Version Control00 Ratings9.02 Ratings
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Amazon Elastic TranscoderAWS CloudFormation
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User Ratings
Amazon Elastic TranscoderAWS CloudFormation
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(3 ratings)
8.0
(7 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic TranscoderAWS CloudFormation
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
It is well suited in a large setting where people use different file formats and various apps to record and transfer their audio or video files across devices. In such scenarios, the transcoder would of real help to eliminate the hassle of converting the files into desired formats for viewing or doing some other analysis.
The transcoder would not be of much use if all the files have the same format and does not need any conversion from their source file formats. It would prove costly and not useful if it's just an additional step that is of no particular use
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Amazon AWS
I still give it an 8 because it's one of those tools that just quietly does the heavy lifting for you but it can really test your patience when it breaks esp with deep nested stacks. It's perfect for projects where we need clean consistent environments every time. It's less ideal for quick experimental setups like new EC2 configs or Lambda permission tweaks.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Works at scale, you can can transcode a high number of videos at the same time.
  • Supports a good number of formats.
  • Good integration with AWS S3 and other AWS Services.
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Amazon AWS
  • All resources can segregated based on stacks which provides greater visibility
  • A complete audit trail of what went wrong while deploying a particular resource
  • Automatically rollbacks if any service as part of CloudFormation results in an error
  • The UI tool is useful
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Amazon Elastic Transcoder requires a fair amount of setup.
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Amazon AWS
  • Error Description upon Failure Needs to be Improved.
  • Slow to create, delete or update.
  • Need to delete resources manually. It can ask before starting deletion whether to skip those resources or delete them.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
It's easy enough to get a shared template & apply it. You don't even have to download-then-upload or copy-and-paste, a publicly-accessible url works.
Diving deeper, it has enough powerful capabilities to make the life of a platform / DevOps engineer bearable.
However, you need equally deep knowledge to troubleshoot issues, when they inevitably pop up. This is the same for all IaC technologies, as they are additional abstraction layers on top of the native API provided by the cloud providers.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
Support for Amazon Elastic Transcoder is the same as any other service within AWS. If you are familiar with AWS, it is easy to start using Elastic Transcoder
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Amazon Elastic Transcoder is in a league of its own when compared to other alternatives in the market. The most noticeable competitor would be either Microsoft or Adobe or Google. When I had a chance to compare Azure products and Amazon products, the difference is obvious and the experience provided by both the products are very different in terms of user experience and interaction with the application. The cost and availability also were taken into consideration when choosing between the two shortlisted choices. So we went with Amazon's product as it is widely used and has support and maintenance which is basically better than the competition.
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Amazon AWS
Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information. Management guide.For information copy of the original. The new virtual Cloning virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Less time for integration with this service if you are already in AWS stack
  • No real time transcoding is a negative
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Amazon AWS
  • + We can standup a VPC in minutes
  • - It took a lot of inital time to set up
  • + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier.
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ScreenShots

AWS CloudFormation Screenshots

Screenshot of CloudFormation - How it works overviewScreenshot of CloudFormation - High level how it worksScreenshot of CloudFormation - Template exampleScreenshot of CloudFormation - Template inputs overview