AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs. Google App Engine vs. Salesforce Agentforce Sales

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.

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Google App Engine is especially well suited for situations where there is a variable workload during the day, e.g. inbound task processing with task queues. In this situation queues can be setup with parameters governing the process speed/scaling which allows you to easily balance performance with cost and meet a good balance.

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In the end, I think we can always make it fit — and that’s one of the powers of Salesforce. Because of its flexibility and wide range of possibilities, you can really make it work for almost any need. The key, though, is to make thoughtful decisions upfront and plan carefully how you set it up. If you do that, you’ll end up with a truly flexible and effective system.

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• 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.

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• Building an application that uses Google's Authentication, means users no longer need to remember an different user id and password. Once they are logged into to Google, they can seamlessly access your application hosted on Google App Engine.
• Google App Engine automatically scales up and down. SO if your application receives a spike in user traffic, App Engine automatically launches additional instances of your application to cater for the increased traffic. Once App Engine detects that the spike is usage is over, it automatically scales down to handle the current traffic.
• Google App Engine can be easily integrated with Google Cloud SQL, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage etc, so that you can build out a full application using one or more of Google's Cloud Platform products.

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• It does a good job of routing our leads to customers, to our inside sales reps and teams.
• It does a good job of tracking all of the opportunities that we have, the contacts that we have with people related to the opportunities.
• Organizing and being able to do reports on what our sales are.

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• 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.

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• For beginners, there is a learning curve that can be reduced by decluttering the functionalities.
• For much big migrations it takes to a lot of time to deploy which can be reduced.
• The scaling of applications based on the user count is not seamless and it requires improvement.

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• I’d say the only thing that can be a bit tricky — and I know Tableau helps address this — is that sometimes we’re limited in how deep we can go with the data in terms of reporting. It would be great to have a bit more robustness within the app itself. However, we’ve figured out our workarounds, and overall, I think it’s a fantastic product — which is why I’ve been working with it for 23 years.

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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.

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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.

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There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

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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

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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

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All in all, it's a great product that use all day, every day. It's aesthetically pleasing overall and specifically provides information in a clean, concise way. It's easy to manipulate and seems to play well with the other products I use such as Pardot, Gmelius, and our company's proprietary data system. It increases my efficieny in my admin tasks so I have more time to focus on revenue-generation and account management. It's also easy to use from everywhere where it be on a university campus, in a hotel room, one of a million Starbucks, or at home

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All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:

Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community's home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you'll find:

Live and historical data on system performance
Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance
Phishing, malicious software and social engineering threats
Best security practices for your organization
Information on how we safeguard your data

For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon

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.

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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.

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The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

- 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.

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Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

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.

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App Engine is a much more streamlined system than EC2. There is a fundamental difference between them, but they are used for basically the same thing as far a I could tell -- to serve applications EC2 is certainly more complicated, but if offers more machine-level control if that's what you need. It can tend to cost more as well. App Engine is far more straightforward but there are limitations if you need to change the environment. But even then, Google Compute Engine also compares to EC2 and stays within GCP.

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Based on my experience, I’ve used Odoo — it’s an open-source ERP system. It’s not exactly the same as Salesforce or Sales Cloud, but it serves a similar purpose. And I feel that Sales Cloud is better. Personally, I find it easier to use and better than what Odoo offers, especially in terms of customization and achieving business objectives. That’s where Salesforce Sales Cloud really stands out in comparison to Odoo.

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It's very scalable as it has a ton of features (but you do need an admin who understands how to leverage these features). Because of the various features, we've also needed to host onboarding sessions with our users so that they can familiarize themselves with the platform, which isn't always super user-friendly or intuitive.

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• 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.

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• App Engine can scale basically infinitely so our users can always expect fast responsiveness.
• App Engine has saved us money by only using the resources we need when we need them.
• The security and IAM policies surrounding App Engine have saved a lot of head aches.

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• It helps us achieve our objectives, especially now with Agentforce — we can get more insights to help our sellers sell more. It’s really nice because it’s almost like you can use the standard part of Salesforce to train your agents and teach your sellers how to improve their sales. So that’s really nice.

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