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
Kissflow
Score 7.6 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
KiSSFLOW is a cloud-based business process management and workflow management software designed to enable users to create an unlimited number of automated business applications with a through a simple user interface.
$15
per month per user
Pricing
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Kissflow
Editions & Modules
No Charge
$0
Users pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2, S3 buckets, etc.) used to store and run the application.
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.
Workflow. I would absolutely, 100% recommend it for a school, in Admissions, and I would recommend it to any small company who has an issue with workflow. The best thing about the program is that it knows what it is, and knows what it wants to be. You aren't going to sit down to work with KiSSFLOW and end up being sold an HR program. To make it work just right, find the person who truly understands how your business works. Have them build a workflow which takes care of the tedious tasks, and then let them train others on the process. You will find that your productivity increases, and that your paper costs decrease.
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.
Ease of Use: It's easier to use and see workflow tasks that are assigned to you, workflows that you've participated in, or workflows that are pending other peoples approvals. From a development side, it's easy to pick up and begin creating processes if you know Excel formulation, which is easily researched as well.
Ease of Access: Since KiSSFLOW is hosted in the cloud, you can access the site from any internet connected device. All you have to do is sign in with your account, as opposed to needing to be on the network to access like our previous system.
The App: This is a feature we really hope to get a lot of use out of. With the way our business is structured, there are a lot of Regional positions that are always on the go. Because our current system requires a user to be on the network to access, this makes it hard for these roles to respond to tasks, causing bottlenecks. With an app available, along with push notifications, we can keep these tasks responses on pace with the associates required in that task.
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.
The reporting could use some improvement. The actual reports are OK, it is access to the reports that is the problem. This is related to the permission schema. It really just has user, admin, and nothing in-between. There really needs to be something like report admin or something. Excel exports for data are needed as well.
The user workflow selection UI is not the best. There is a big red + sign in the lower right of the browser window that is not labeled. That is not clear. Also the selection list is just a pop-up window, it really should be a full page.
The mobile app does not have all the features that the browser version has, especially admin tools.
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.
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.
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 haven't encountered a need for support with KiSSFLOW. It's not a perfect platform, but it's functional, dependable, and reasonably intuitive. I can't fault a support team just because their product works!
- 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.
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.
KiSSFLOW is much easier to set up, less coding and easier to explain to those that are being trained. The company already had SharePoint, but it is a very difficult system to set up. A class had to be taken, along with getting books in order to understand the process of the workflow. With KiSSFLOW, it is simple to understand, the helpdesk is quick with their response, help topics are laid out simply and you can even talk with someone on that side to ask your questions. Overall, KiSSFLOW is a much easier workflow and system to use.
