More like FANTASTIC Beanstalk!
May 29, 2018
More like FANTASTIC Beanstalk!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with AWS Elastic Beanstalk
We use Elastic Beanstalk as a quick and easy way to implement test environments in our development process. It allows us to quickly configure deployment scenarios and do testing that would otherwise take ages to set up with traditional in-house server technologies. We can easily scale up and down and test our apps against a true to life deployment configuration. It is only used by the development team.
- Extremely easy to get set up and get apps deployed.
- Integrates really well with existing build processes and is manageable through a suite of CLI tools.
- It is very easy to scale up.
- The documentation is exceptionally detailed and covers a very wide range of deployment scenarios.
- The product is generally very good, but if there is one thing I'd improve it is the web-based user interface for managing instances.
- Greatly reduced time in setting up and deploying test environments has saved a lot of hours and money.
- Near-zero maintenance means that we don't spend any time tending to servers, the app containers just work.
- The initial learning curve is a little steep to get services hosted in Elastic Beanstalk talking to external services like Redis, MongoDB, etc; but once one understands the pattern, development is a breeze.
- The command line interface has enabled us to build many utility scripts that simplify our development workflow, thereby saving time.
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running after a few days of struggling with its mediocre user interface and constant issues with documentation being outdated.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.
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.