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
AWS Fargate
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
AWS Fargate is a compute engine for Amazon ECS that allows the user to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. With AWS Fargate there is no need to provision, configure, and scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers.
$0
*per hour
Pricing
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Fargate
Editions & Modules
No Charge
$0
Users pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2, S3 buckets, etc.) used to store and run the application.
Fargate Spot per GB
$0.00138679
*per hour
per GB
$0.004445
*per hour
Fargate Spot per vCPU
$0.01262932
*per hour
per vCPU
$0.04048
*per hour
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Fargate
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
*based on US East rates. Price varies region to region.
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.
If you need to deploy Docker containers, Amazon Fargate is a very good fit. It integrates very well with other AWS services like RDS, EFS, and Secrets manager. You can have a very robust application using those services. In case you have many containers to deploy, it is however more expensive that if you use other services like ECS or EKS, since they allow you to share the same infrastructure to deploy multiple containers.
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.
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.
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.
Pricing and billing of AWS Fargate is loosely tied to your exisiting AWS billing. You're unlikely to only use Fargate in your AWS subscription, so you get billed for everything alltoghter.
Fargate is naturally a bit more expensive that usuel docker services, but with careful planning and architecturing, you can have a very manageable cost.
You can also rely on Saving plans to reduce your bill.
