AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Heroku 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.

Heroku is very well suited for startups looking to get a server stack up and running quickly. There is little to no overhead when managing your instances. However, you'll need a background in basic DevOps or system management to make sure everything is set up correctly. In addition, it's easy to accidentally go crazy on pricing. Make sure you're only creating the server instances you need to run the base application and set up an auto-scaler plugin to handle peaks.

• 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.

• Heroku has a very simple deployment model, making it easy to get your application up-and-running with minimal effort. We can focus on our efforts the unique aspects of our application.
• The robust add-on marketplace makes it easy to try out new approaches with minimal effort and investment -- and when we settle on a solution, we can easily scale it.
• Heroku's support is quite good -- their staff is quite technical and willing to get into the weeds to diagnose even complicated problems.

• By having it as software as a service, we do not have all the government of the information to which the application codes are uploaded.
• It requires the intervention of an administrator for its management, even the routine maintenance of the platform is not very automated and requires the intervention of operating personnel.
• Its ecosystem and integration with third party software is not yet enriched, it is complex to manage if the AWS EB application is required to be integrated with another service in order to operate.

• Large price jumps between certain resource tiers (2x Dyno for $50 per month versus Performance Dyno for $250). Free Postgres next jumps to $50 per month.
• Marketing/Branding to non-technical stakeholders. As the years pass, I've had to fight more to convince stakeholders on the value of Heroku over AWS.
• Improve Buildpack documentation. This is one area where Heroku's documentation is fairly confusing.

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.

Heroku is easy to use, services a ton of functions for you out of the box, and provides a means to get a software product off the ground and managed quickly and easily. The tools provide allows a small to medium size org to move very quickly. The CLI tools provided make managing an entire technical infrastructure simple.

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.

Easy to use web based console and easy to use command line tools; deployment is done directly from a GIT repository. What more could you ask for? The one thing that keeps me from giving it a 10 is that custom build packs are almost incomprehensible. We used one for a while because we needed cairo graphics processing. Fortunately, I was able to figure out a different way to do what we needed so that we could get off the custom build pack.

Heroku availability correlates pretty strongly to AWS US EAST availability. We had a couple of times where there was a Heroku-specific issue but not for the last 7-8 months.

The only issue that I ever have is that about 1 out of 20 deployments (git push) will hang and need to be cancelled and done again.

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.

I've used it for many years without facing any major problem. It's not hard at all to get used to it, it's documentation is outstanding and simple. We are close to 2020 and I don't think most of the existing companies or startups should still face old problems such as wasting time deploying code and calculate computing resources.

- 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.

Be ready to pay a bit more than expected in the beginning if you're migrating from a big server. The application is probably not ready for the change and you have to keep improving it with time.

It's also important to consider that you can't save anything to the disc as it will be lost when your application restarts, so you have to think about using something like S3.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk handles better in server autoscaling, load balancers,networking infrastructure for databases. It also helps in creating all of the architecture needed to run our apps and services. [AWS] Elastic Beanstalk also handles all of the provisioning, scaling, and implementation of the application stack unlike other competitors without a fuss.

Heroku is the more expensive option for hosting compared to some of the cloud platforms we investigated, but it's worth it for us because of the plug-and-play nature of Heroku deployment. We can be up and running in a few minutes and know with precision how much it will cost us each month to run the application, unlike Amazon Web Services where you have to go to great pains to configure it correctly or else you might end up with a shocking monthly bill. Overall, spending the time to configure Amazon Web Services or one of its competitors is likely the more affordable and powerful choice, because you have control over so many specifics of the configuration. But it also requires the burden of continuing to maintain and update your AWS instance, whereas with Heroku they take care of security fixes and platform upgrades. It's a great service and we are happy to pay the extra cost for the value-adds Heroku provides.

• 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.

• It has been critical in seamlessly operating our platform with runs all of our programs.
• It has been impressive with its ability to scale quickly which results in the growth of our work.
• It allows for tracking of different features which allows for quick problem solving which saves us time.