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
Google App Engine
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Google App Engine is Google Cloud's platform-as-a-service offering. It features pay-per-use pricing and support for a broad array of programming languages.
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Moodle
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Moodle is an open source learning management system with hundreds of millions of users around the globe and translated into over 100 languages, used by organizations to support their education and training needs.
N/A
Pricing
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Google App Engine
Moodle
Editions & Modules
No Charge
$0
Users pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2, S3 buckets, etc.) used to store and run the application.
Starting Price
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Max Price
$0.30
Per Hour Per Instance
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Google App Engine
Moodle
Free Trial
No
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Google App Engine
Moodle
Considered Multiple Products
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Verified User
Engineer
Chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is equivalent to Google App Engine in terms of product. I selected AWS Elastic Beanstalk because it was within the stack we were using, and it made sense for us given the other architecture.
I selected AWS Elastic Beanstalk mainly because we have been using AWS services for our company. Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk is relatively easier than starting to use a completely new cloud platform. But we are also reviewing Google App Engine, and found out Elastic Beanstalk …
In some of the other companies that I've worked in, I've had the opportunity to work with the above softwares where the structure and architecture of the services was much complicated but the above softwares were able to handle it with more ease and efficiency. The complex …
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 …
I have used App Engine on Google Cloud Platform and App Service on Microsoft Azure. Both offer similar capabilities to AWS Elastic Beanstalk. App Engine has the nice ability to scale to 0 instances when the application has not been in use for some time. This allows for …
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a great option for an organization that's already invested in the AWS ecosystem. The greater the number of complementary features needed by the application (e.g. integrating with Amazon's Elastic Load Balancer, databases, etc), the greater the reward …
simpler and cheaper sums up the benefits. AWS became too bureaucratic while Google App Engine made he process easier to setup. Again, I just spent a few minutes to setup a simple app, setup a budget, add my credit card and have it up and running. Google is captivating its user …
We commonly decide between App Service, Elastic Beanstalk, and App Engine. Normally, we do not have a strong preference for the services, it really comes down to whether or not there are other factors drawing us toward a particular platform. In the case of App Engine, it is a …
I think that Microsoft and Amazon are simply investing more in their offerings, and there are a bunch of cool PaaS solutions out there as well. Google App Engine is solid, and is probably the right choice for some projects. But ultimately one should evaluate each platform …
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.
App Engine is such a good resource for our team both internally and externally. You have complete control over your app, how it runs, when it runs, and more while Google handles the back-end, scaling, orchestration, and so on. If you are serving a tool, system, or web page, it's perfect. If you are serving something back-end, like an automation or ETL workflow, you should be a little considerate or careful with how you are structuring that job. For instance, the Standard environment in Google App Engine will present you with a resource limit for your server calls. If your operations are known to take longer than, say, 10 minutes or so, you may be better off moving to the Flexible environment (which may be a little more expensive but certainly a little more powerful and a little less limited) or even moving that workflow to something like Google Compute Engine or another managed service.
Moodle is great for any environment where a class or other learning activity needs to be completed in an asynchronous manner. It can be used to post information, create interactive threads for discussion, issue quiz and exam work with grading, track and grade progress, and keep track of attendance. It is an overall wonderful solution for managing asynchronous learning.
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.
There is a slight learning curve to getting used to code on Google App Engine.
Google Cloud Datastore is Google's NoSQL database in the cloud that your applications can use. NoSQL databases, by design, cannot give handle complex queries on the data. This means that sometimes you need to think carefully about your data structures - so that you can get the results you need in your code.
Setting up billing is a little annoying. It does not seem to save billing information to your account so you can re-use the same information across different Cloud projects. Each project requires you to re-enter all your billing information (if required)
The interface is not very intuitive. You must know what you are looking for in order to navigate effectively.
Although installation of Moodle is easy, it is a little more difficult to configure it with your other Learning tools. As an example, LDAP synchronization is a little difficult.
The interface is a little dated, even though new releases keep coming out (which is great!) none of them really add value to the appearance of the platform.
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.
App Engine is a solid choice for deployments to Google Cloud Platform that do not want to move entirely to a Kubernetes-based container architecture using a different Google product. For rapid prototyping of new applications and fairly straightforward web application deployments, we'll continue to leverage the capabilities that App Engine affords us.
We use it because it is what have committed to back in 2011. Perhaps Moodle will evolve and advance in a positive way that will alleviate most of our user-based gripes? Perhaps it will not appear to be as cost effective given the need for a certain level of engineering and support staff to maintain it at a future level of sustainability? It's hard to say. As an enterprise scale critical application, we like it, but don't love it. Our instructors don't particularly like it at all.
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
I had to revisit the UI after a year of just setting up and forgetting. The UI got some improvements but the amount of navigation we have to go through to setup a new app has increased but also got easier to setup. Gemini now is integrated and make getting answers faster
Moodle can be used on a tablet, on a mobile phone, and on a PC. It is easy to navigate for learners and figure out for administrators. The learners can easily complete tasks and the administrators can easily track completion. The last thing about Moodle that one may not realize is that it somewhat resembles Facebook in its layout. This means that users are already familiar with the interface and therefore they are more comfortable using it.
Yes, Moodle is always available. We are self-hosted and Moodle is always up and available. The only time that it is not available is when we are upgrading it each semester. It is then down for just a few planned hours. That is in-between semesters and we let the faculty and students know. We do it on a Friday evening and it is back up within a few hours.
Moodle is an excellent LMS in relationship to any other one that I have seen or used. The pages load quickly and the reports complete in a reasonable time frame. Moodle has taken on Respondus, StudyMate, BigBlueButton, Turning Tech, Turnitin2, Certificates, Attendance, Tegrity, Questionnaire, Virtual Programming Lab, and Badges. All of these programs work right in with Moodle and do not cause any issues. Instructors may also use Camtasia and Snagit software as well as using webcams, downloading videos from the Internet, adding into books, or any of the many other areas within Moodle. Our instructors use the grade books without many problems and really don't ask questions much anymore. We upgrade Moodle every semester and are currently on 2.9+. Our instructors have basically learned to use most of the resources and activities.
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.
Good amount of documentation available for Google App Engine and in general there is large developer community around Google App Engine and other products it interacts with. Lastly, Google support is great in general. No issues so far with them.
Moodle is open source, and must be evaluated in that context, but one also has to provide a fair comparison to competing products with commercial backing. Support varies depending on the component of Moodle. Bug reports in Moodle Core that affect security or stability are dealt with promptly. Functionality requests or features not working smoothly may or may not be addressed, depending on whether the functionality desired matches the "vision" of Moodle HQ. The user community provides excellent support for initial installation and configuration, but more complex questions may go unanswered, unless they are noticed by someone who happens to know the answer. The support forum feature at the Moodle site (the same feature used within Moodle itself) does not provide granular subscription to topic discussions, apparently by design, and Moodle HQ seems resistant to changing this feature.
- 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.
Find a partner who will work with you during the implementation process. Be sure to provide ample training for veteran users on the changes and for newbies on the overall product.
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.
We were on another much smaller cloud provider and decided to make the switch for several reasons - stability, breadth of services, and security. In reviewing options, GCP provided the best mixtures of meeting our needs while also balancing the overall cost of the service as compared to the other major players in Azure and AWS.
Blackboard has clear advantages in rubric management, and offers a content management system of its own. The largest barrier is cost for smaller or financially-disadvantaged organizations. However, as in any IT project, adequate resources must be made for even "free" software.
Well, I administer Moodle for a dozen of our divisions and there is a wide range of flexibility between offerings. I have course instructors who use every module i their course, chock full of videos, pictures, links to web tools for synchronous sessions within the asynchronous course. I also have others who are content with a syllabus, a few pdfs, links to podcast lectures and a few simple assignments. No matter if your organization is big or small, or if your requirements are strict for credentialing or non-existent (for internal know-how), Moodle can accommodate you.
Effective integration to other java based frameworks.
Time to market is very quick. Build, test, deploy and use.
The GAE Whitelist for java is an important resource to know what works and what does not. So use it. It would also be nice for Google to expand on items that are allowed on GAE platform.
While it certainly takes more time to develop an online training vs a face-to-face we can offer the same content over and over again and meet a larger audience. There's no way we could have offered these trainings face-to-face to the same size audience. Economically it's just not feasible. Moodle allows us to share multiple trainings on a variety of topics over extended periods of time in a cost effective way.
The impact on early interventionists is still being evaluated, but we do know that early interventionist now have more ways to access professional development than in the past. The ability to customize the registration page has allowed us to track which agencies in Virginia are having their staff participate and we can see which topics are favored above others.
Other LMS's were far too costly. Aside from the monthly hosting fees (less than $200 a year), and the time it took to do the initial install and setup, Moodle is free. Once it's setup the only elearning costs are related to the development and creation of each training and then the setup of training on Moodle. This allows us to devote more time and money to the development and creation of more courses vs. the management of the system.
Minimal tech support for the users is required and most requests are limited to lost/userid passwords. The course designer is able to manage tech support needs for the users because so few requests are received.
