Item: AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Rating: 9
Author: Ramindu Deshapriya

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Reduced time from development to deployment by 30% over typical deployments to EC2 instances
Reduced performance tuning time by 50% over classic auto-scaling group configuration and EC2 instances
Reduced time to configure security for an application by 15% over classic VPC, IG and Security Group configuration times

Alternatives Considered

DigitalOcean Droplets, OpenShift and Heroku Platform

The AWS platform provides a great deal of configurability that is abstracted and provided very well through AWS Elastic Beanstalk. This is the main reason for choosing Elastic Beanstalk over competing services. Another reason for selecting AWS Beanstalk was vendor compatibility, and the fact that our current infrastructure is running mostly on AWS services.

Support Rating

Based on the support contract you have purchased from AWS, support for Elastic Beanstalk can be very good. We have Enterprise-level support and have AWS architects on-call to help us out with any issues. There is a great deal of support material for Elastic Beanstalk apart from that as well, from forums to support groups on various communication channels. With this help, we were able to resolve any issues we had with Elastic Beanstalk very quickly.

Key Insights

Do you think AWS Elastic Beanstalk delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with AWS Elastic Beanstalk's feature set?

Yes

Did AWS Elastic Beanstalk live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of AWS Elastic Beanstalk go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy AWS Elastic Beanstalk again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Heroku Platform, AWS Lambda, AWS CodePipeline

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Climbing the Beanstalk: Best way to manage applications in the AWS giant's house

Overall Satisfaction with AWS Elastic Beanstalk