AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs. Firebase

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is well suited for [the] rapid development of applications that use standard compute platforms based on popular programming languages. So getting a Go, Python, Ruby, or Node.js app going in AWS Elastic Beanstalk will be easy. For non-standard applications, containers provide another option for using AWS Elastic Beanstalk. In either case, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is well suited for applications that are [self-contained]. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is also good for development or test environments that need a built-in deployment method. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is less appropriate for complex applications that rely on multiple AWS services. While deploying and running the base code might be easy to get going, it may be difficult to apply permissions and integrations with the other services.

Incentivized

Firebase should be your first choice if your platform is mobile first. Firebase's mobile platform support for client-side applications is second to none, and I cannot think of a comparable cross-platform toolkit. Firebase also integrates well with your server-side solution, meaning that you can plug Firebase into your existing app architecture with minimal effort.

Firebase lags behind on the desktop, however. Although macOS support is rapidly catching up, full Windows support is a glaring omission for most Firebase features. This means that if your platform targets Windows, you will need to implement the client functionality manually using Firebase's web APIs and wrappers, or look for another solution.

Incentivized

• Extremely easy to get set up and get apps deployed.
• Integrates really well with existing build processes and is manageable through a suite of CLI tools.
• It is very easy to scale up.
• The documentation is exceptionally detailed and covers a very wide range of deployment scenarios.

Incentivized

• Extremely robust. Has about any tool you can think of under one roof making it extremely useful as a backup platform for data analytics or small teams that need something quickly.
• Intuitive and easy UI/UX. Being made and owned by Google, you expect nothing less. Very easy to use for anyone that has any marketing or analytical experience especially in Google Analytics (which I just assume all marketers do).
• Safe, secure, and sturdy. Never need to worry about downtimes or misinformation as it's as clean and safe as it is being run by Google.
• FREE! What else is there to say. Unless you're an extremely large application handling hundreds of thousands to millions of users, this pay as you go plan will stay free.

Incentivized

• How to more easily integrate with other other AWS services. There are plenty out there, but it's not quite as seamless as I feel like it should be to mix and match products.
• Make backing up easier when scaling the server. It took quite a bit of time to make sure we had everything set up in case something went wrong.
• When you are first starting to use AWS, the dashboard can be very intimidating. There are countless products all with names that aren't very indicative of what they actually do.

Incentivized

• Firebase/Firestore has very limited support for querying more complicated items; for example, performing a simple string search is not possible.
• While upfront costs are low, costs can grow quickly if you're not careful about what you are being billed for.
• Dashboards have at times shown different information to what is billed, and support from Google is less than stellar and not as effective as that from Amazon or Microsoft.

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

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 don't use the Firebase UI much, but rather connect it to GA4. GA4 has a great event model but the GA4 UI and analysis capabilities are limited. It's harder to measure product usage type of engagement but if you have the time and resources to leverage the GA4 to BiqQuery export you'll have all the raw event data you'll need for deep analysis, segmentation, and audience activation.

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

Our analytics folks handled the majority of the communication when it came to customer service, but as far as I was aware, the support we got was pretty good. When we had an issue, we were able to reach out and get support in a timely fashion. Firebase was easy to reach and reasonably available to assist when needed.

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

There are many services like AWS Elastic beanstalk, but there are none with the maturity in the platform or the cost-effectiveness of AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Also, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the oldest among them, so there are more people with AWS experience than the other platforms. The only thing is their documentation and UX are a bit old, which doesn't stop it from performing greatly, but yes, if you are looking for better UX, then you can check out other options.

Incentivized

Before using Firebase, we exclusively used self hosted database services. Using Firebase has allowed us to reduce reliance on single points of failure and systems that are difficult to scale. Additionally, Firebase is much easier to set up and use than any sort of self hosted database. This simplicity has allowed us to try features that we might not have based on the amount of work they required in the past.

Incentivized

• Elastic Beanstalk removes countless hours from development team responsibility, freeing up those resources to instead focus on building the products that our customers want to use.
• As a business that is already embedded into using EC2 instances, it's essentially free to leverage the work that AWS performs on configuring the Elastic Beanstalk stacks.
• With Elastic Beanstalk, while there is still a responsibility to ensure that applications can work with updated underlying dependencies, it's much easier when AWS handled the heavy lifting of updating the stacks.

Incentivized

• Firebase has been able to help us understand reliably, the drop-off in our user flows with their funnel feature. This has made it easy for us to be able to pinpoint weaknesses in our funnel and test and optimize with data as the dependent variable.
• From an economic standpoint, we don't pay for Firebase which is great, but as the saying goes "You get what you pay for" also holds true in this context. As we looked to grow and scale, we looked for a paid solution.
• From a developer resource standpoint, Firebase has been extremely easy to integrate into our app. Whether it be the event tracking, dynamic links or crash reporting we have not had to waste too much developer time thanks to their well-organized developer docs.

Incentivized