Item: AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Rating: 8
Author: Brad Ranks

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Elastic Beanstalk to deploy Node.js applications. In the past, we had to provision a server and then determine capacities. Now all of that worry is gone. Just upload and go! I love it. Now when we are asked to determine max load of the "system" we can pretty much just say, unlimited.

Pros and Cons

Fast to deploy
Easy to get up and running
Easy to manage

Command line interface could be easier, but it still works.
Documentation could be better

Return on Investment

Overall the impact of using Elastic Beanstalk has been quite positive.
The only difficult part is the global adoption by all of the teams.

Usability

Like most everything on AWS, you are stuck rifling through mountains of outdated "documentation" to learn how to do things. Most of the tutorials and training do not work properly or are not complete, so trial and error are your best friend.

Support Rating

Support is non-existent. You better have someone with lots of experience if you plan on placing this in a production environment, otherwise you will fall victim to to all of those one-off issues.

Alternatives Considered

AWS Lambda

We ended up with AWS Lambda to take workload off the developers and develop in tandem, then later integrate. We use both though.

Other Software Used

AWS Lambda, Heroku

Likelihood to Recommend

This is great for small services and applications that need to have up-time availability or are business critical. Pretty much everything that you have on the one computer in the corner (You know the one. It was a leftover computer that turned into a dev/testing box, then became the production utility box) Yeah, everyone does that at least once.... Put ALL of those projects into elastic beanstalk now.

Elastic Beanstalk Review

Overall Satisfaction with AWS Elastic Beanstalk