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
SecureLink Enterprise Access
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
SecureLink is a platform for remote support in regulated industries. Enterprise software vendors use SecureLink to deliver remote support and services. Hospitals, banks, casinos and other regulated entities use SecureLink to authenticate, control and audit remote access for their vendors, business associates and other 3rd parties.
N/A
Pricing
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
SecureLink Enterprise Access
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.
It does exactly what it needs to. The only times I've had serious issues with rolling out to a vendor is when they have a "contractual agreement" to only use their solution. Almost every vendor that I've worked with and shown this product to has been skeptical for the first 5 minutes and fully converted to liking the ease of use of the product by 10 minutes
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.
Java based. Always an issue. I know they are working on this and it will be Javaless if we need it. I know that Java can cause issues across the board and I understand the need of it, but it does not make it any better when there are Java issues.
Stronger integration with the Active Directory. Currently its only read-only, which is good and bad.
I would love to see an App. I know they are working on this as well.
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.
The employees at Securelink have always been responsive and seem to be invested in the success of my company. They truly understand what their product means to us so if there is a problem, they are always willing to help. In the rare event that something is found on their end, they will be proactive and reach out to someone to help and get something on calendar for a fix
- 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.
Securelink seems to work better than LogMein for a large enterprise group. Our company has over 10,000 different connections and securelink manages them well.
I've found that Securelink allows me to get a vendor access to an application for support purposes much faster than a provisioned VPN account and the red tape around this. I can set up a vendor to access an application suite in a half hour and it will be more secure than regular provisioning.
The ROI is yet to be seen on this, but it certainly makes Compliance, Internal Audit, and Legal very happy, which helps everybody.
Internally, there is much more push back and it has been problematic. For a tech, to have to log in to a server and navigate to a system is considered cumbersome, when before all they had to do was open up Putty or RDP to a server to get in. The only way to combat this is to force them to use Securelink by removing rights. Near impossible for the domain admins.
