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 Elastic Beanstalk
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the platform-as-a-service offering provided by Amazon and designed to leverage AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
$35
per month
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Editions & Modules
Audio Only
$0.0045
per minute
Less than 720p
$0.015
per minute
720p and above
$0.03
per minute
No Charge
$0
Users pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2, S3 buckets, etc.) used to store and run the application.
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Amazon 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is a great tool to manage your applications. You just need to write the codes, and after that with one click, your app will be online and accessible from the internet. That is a huge help for people who do not know about infrastructure or do not want to spend money on maintaining infrastructure.
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
