Likelihood to Recommend Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities. Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions. It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world. Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating - 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features
Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup,
Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost. The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in. If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents. Read full review 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 Read full review ScreenShots