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AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Overview

What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

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).

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Recent Reviews

Fantastic Tool by AWS

8 out of 10
May 09, 2021
Incentivized
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is being used in specific departments of my organization. The major business problem that it solves is that there is …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

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  • Scalability (28)
    9.9
    99%
  • Platform management overhead (27)
    9.7
    97%
  • Development environment replication (28)
    9.5
    95%
  • Platform access control (27)
    9.3
    93%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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No Charge

$0

Cloud
Users pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2, S3 buckets, etc.) used to store and run the application.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $35 per month
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Product Demos

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Tutorial | AWS Certification | AWS Tutorial | Edureka

YouTube
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Features

Platform-as-a-Service

Platform as a Service is the set of tools and services designed to make coding and deploying applications much more efficient

9.6
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

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).

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is designed for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.

Developers can simply upload their code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, users retain full control over the AWS resources powering their application and can access the underlying resources at any time.

There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk - pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run applications.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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).

AWS Elastic Beanstalk starts at $35.

Heroku Platform, Engine Yard, and Red Hat OpenShift are common alternatives for AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Reviewers rate Ease of building user interfaces highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of AWS Elastic Beanstalk are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(274)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-9 of 9)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Rebecca Scott | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
The scaling capability and the effective container management through AWS Elastic Beanstalk is excellent and the deployment management is also impressive. Performance easy management, reliable Cloud services management capability with AWS Elastic Beanstalk is amazing. Workload easy management and access control capability is on top as well providing security for underlying infrastructure.
  • Autoscaling options.
  • Containerization tool.
  • Deployment management functions.
  • Workload management capability.
  • On multiple deployment operations managed can be tricky some time.
  • Big Cloud data protection.
  • Setting Cloud tools when just getting started with the platform.
Cloud workloads running solutions and the ability to manage container images and effective scaling through AWS Elastic Beanstalk is incredible. The data protection across Cloud services and the speed of deployment is very productive and the multiple programming model support offered by AWS Elastic Beanstalk is perfect and easy on data source connectivity across different Cloud platforms.
Partha Roy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an all-rounder product that helps us quickly deploy our software on the cloud. It also allows us to scale up easily on demand.
  • It helps us to deploy several services of AWS in the cloud.
  • Out of the box security and privacy provided by AWS Elastic Beanstalk is unmatchable.
  • The user experience is super intuitive and helps a lot throughout the deployment process.
  • Reliability across different services is quite surprising.
  • It's very easy to get started with but very difficult to master, as the documentation is scattered across and the tutorials are dated. So one has to be well experienced in this in order to make the most out of the service.
  • Even though the user experience is good, it's backdated, it has an old UI system, which could be changed, and a modern, fresh look can be used.
  • While working with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, one has to be very attentive and scrutinise all the steps in order to miss out settings, which can lead to surprising billings (which is a very common phenomena.)
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We have been using AWS Elastic Bean stalk for around 3 years and it is one of the best services provided by AWS for developers who don't want get into managing lower level configurations like Load Balancing, auto scaling group, instance type and instance placement groups. We just need to zip their code files and select the environment for the application and that's pretty much it, we can also enable versioning for our deployments and it supports various environment like DEV, PROD etc. And the most beautiful thing about AWS Elastic Beanstalk is that you just need to choose setup types (i.e High Availability, single instance (for dev environment) and custom configuration as well) and it also supports AWS RDS, you just need to configure the connection strings of RDS into your code that's it. It has reduced work of cloud infrastructure by 40-45%.
  • Comes with preconfiguration of all infrastructure service with EC2 instance.
  • Developer with basic knowledge of cloud can also deploy applications.
  • It comes with the optimum plan for various scenarios like high availability, consistency.
  • It has almost all environments available for services.
  • Not easy to do customization for some services.
  • Not recommended for big environment back-end services.
  • Customer support is okay!
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is recommended for applications which do not require complex configurations and just wanted to go live quickly. It's not recommended for complex configuration and big application deployments.
Ramindu Deshapriya | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is being used across my organization for the deployment of applications running on NodeJS, Python, and Java stacks. IT provides an easy-to-use deployment model to run applications on pre-built application stacks on EC2 instances without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure and application stack. It provides an abstraction layer on top of a range of AWS services such as load balancers, security, and auto-scaling, allowing configuration of all these options from a single console. Through the use of Elastic Beanstalk, our organization has been able to deploy and manage applications on EC2 instances without the hassle of having to manage the EC2 instances themselves, leading to faster deployment times and smaller maintenance windows.
  • Providing managed application environments
  • In-built load balancing
  • In-built auto-scaling
  • In-built logs and log aggregation through CloudWatch
  • Providing managed updates to applications stacks
  • In-built selection of deployment methods (all-at-once, blue-green etc)
  • Integration with CodePipeline
  • Some configuration options can be too rigid, and you have to delete an environment to change some configuration options.
  • When things go wrong, they fail badly, and you are left with no insight or feedback.
  • Some of the built-in monitoring metrics are hard to understand and configure.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is well-suited for applications that require a medium-to-large set of dependencies and where you want to deploy a custom application to EC2 instances, instead of using a provided service like Lambda functions. It handles deployment of your application to the specified stack very well and with an integration with a deployment tool like AWS CodePipeline, it can be very powerful in getting your application deployed and running. It allows you to deploy both server-type applications and worker-type applications. Elastic Beanstalk is not the best option if your code deployment is small and can be placed within the context of a serverless function.
Joshua Dickson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a great tool to use for supercharging the speed to deploy basic applications that are fine running in fairly generic, but high-quality configurations. In using ELB, most of the complicated tasks of server setup are performed by AWS, so your developers are able to focus their efforts on developing your application and less time worrying about how to configure the deployment.
  • Removes tedious, error-prone work from team focus for server configuration and environment setup.
  • AWS creates new stacks when underlying software requires security updates, or frameworks release new versions.
  • Greatly improves speed-to-production for many applications.
  • Free resource on top of AWS; it costs nothing additional to use Elastic Beanstalk over the cost of the underlying instances and resources.
  • 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.
Elastic Beanstalk is a great fit for a product that's already open to using Amazon Web Services, but has a team that does not want to work with environment setup. Furthermore, it's really only a fit for situations where the configuration needed from the team fits within a stack that Elastic Beanstalk offers. Even if you're interested in using one of the stacks they do support, you have more ability to modify configurations if you're handling all the setup and configuration on your own.
Rahul Chaudhary | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Elastic Beanstalk has been around for some time, but it never caught our eye until we started using AWS CodePipeline.
Currently, we use Elastic Beanstalk (EBS) to run applications on our pipeline. Each stage (dev, perf, prod) has its own set of servers defined under EBS. Our current solution is working very well with CodePipeline.
  • Fits perfectly in our infrastructure. CodeCommit, CodePipeline, and AWS BeanStalk, work in perfect harmony.
  • Easy to change deployment configurations. If I need more servers in my EBS, I just change configurations, and with a click of a button I get more servers. For example, moving from nano instances to micro, or simply adding/deleting more servers.
  • Better security, and upgrade. I usually get small notifications of software/OS updates, and if I choose to, I can simply redeploy my application on an upgraded system.
  • Different upgrade strategies. I haven't tested all [of them], but the current one has the transactional type capability, where if my deployment fails, it falls back to the previous stable one.
  • Difficult to understand. No matter how cute and easy the AWS videos sound, I find it difficult to understand. There are just too many configurations.
  • EBS is free, but you pay for the resources. Problem is, I end up using more resources, thus paying more.
  • They could work on their logging system a bit more. I would love more dashboard metrics in logging, and an easier way to look at logs.
  • An option to make the default URL more friendly. I am forced now to use Route 53 to get a more friendly DNS name, but would have loved if they would have provided a better name to begin with. There are long random strings which could go away.
- It works perfectly with other AWS resources like CodeCommit, CodePipeline. If you are working in an AWS environment, this is a MUST.
- Once you understand how it works, you can use it to easily scale and manage your application.
- It certainly is better than its competitors.

- More AWS resources to manage. Great! Though AWS is easy, with so many options, it is getting tiring to learn more new AWS stuff. So be careful, EBS isn't hard, but isn't easy either.
- If you have a single server, you don't need it.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I used this as a backend hosting solution for my portfolio. I was looking to dive deeper into AWS solutions and this was a fairly easy way to do so with little upfront knowledge. I was looking at alternatives to hosting my site on another service's linux hosting solution and opted to give this try.
  • Scales well
  • Easy to spin up
  • CLI tools are great
  • Documentation was either lacking or too complicated for a beginner
  • The act of removing an instance took me several days to be sure it was actually removed and I wouldn't get billed for it
  • Billing information and estimates are hard to follow
The CLI made getting started incredibly easy. Tutorials made it fairly simple to get up and running without too much fuss. That said, it can be a very complicated solution if all you need is a basic hosting platform. However, it can scale out rapidly and does this amazingly well.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I'm using AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy and manage my personnel web application. The free tier is amazing if you want to try it out, as Amazon provides fair free tier usage, so that you can try it out without paying anything. You just need to be careful about the traffic.
  • Elastic Beanstalk is a great product that provides tools for running your web application in few simple steps.
  • It works on top of the AWS EC2 and provides autoscaling, logging, monitoring for you out of the box.
  • Its security features are great, for those who are looking for it.
  • Their help and support is exceptional.
  • It has so many options and packages, that it is overwhelming for a newcomer.
  • I don't like the dynamic attribution of security groups: the names are random, so it's hard to understand what is going on.
  • The only disadvantage of using EBS is that the instance that gets setup as a part of the EBS environment isn't customizable since the users do not have access to that instance.
It is a fantastic solution if you take the time to learn what is behind it. Look into what you can do with Elastic Beanstalk extensions in particular - they are incredibly effective. Since I've used it mostly for deploying basic PHP applications, I can recommend that it is a very useful service for those purposes. It might not be the best thing to use for something that needs customized services to run on your server.
January 24, 2018

Scalable EBS

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We primarily use AWS Elastic Beanstalk (EBS) for client production websites. The EBS is set up to autoscale, so it works well for when our client's site traffic spikes. Additionally, our development team uses the Atlassian Bamboo to build and deploy to EBS.
  • Scalability: The ability to autoscale based on traffic helps with availability and overall cost.
  • Atlassian Bamboo third-party integration: EBS integrates well with the Atlassian tools. Once our DevOps team sets up the EBS environments and the Bamboo CI, our developers and QA team will be see the changes without the need to log into AWS and deploy the updates manually.
  • Amazon RDS: The RDS can be set up as a part of the EBS configuration or separately. This process to connect a separate RDS or external DB can be challenging, mainly due to security groups and permissions.
  • Application Bundle: When updating an EBS, an application bundle needs to be created. The application bundle is a ZIP file of the entire website. This would be bothersome if you only need to change one code file. But if this file is part of a website that was built on a multi-file/folder framework, you will be required to zip the entire site and push the zip file to an an S3 bucket for deployment. Single file updates are not possible.
Suited: Sites using a server side scripting engine like PHP and will experience bandwidth spikes due to press releases or campaigns. The scalability will help in keeping the overall monthly costs down.

Not Suited: Sites that do not need a server side scripting engine. It would be less expensive and more efficient to use AWS Cloudfront.
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