AWS Elastic Beanstalk - A Brief Overview

Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that simplifies the process of deploying, managing, and scaling web applications and services. If you are a developer, you just want your code to run and you do not want to care about the infrastructure (load balancers, managing servers, scaling…) then Elastic Beanstalk is the great choice for you.

Key components and features

Managed service: Elastic Beanstalk is a developer centric view of deploying an application on AWS, it is a managed service in which AWS automatically handles for us (capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, application, health monitoring, instance configuration…). We are just responsible for our code.

Application Versions: Maintains different versions of our application, allowing easy rollbacks if needed.

We can continuously update our application version.

Pricing: Beanstalk is free and we pay only for the underlying AWS resources that our application consumes.

Multiple Platform Support: Supports various programming languages and frameworks including Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker.

Environment Tier: have 2 environment tiers: Web server environment and worker environment.

Pros and Cons for the Consideration

Pros

• Quickly deploy applications without dealing with infrastructure details
• It has a gentle learning curve, make it a good starting point for developers new to AWS, as it abstracts many complex concepts.
• Helps optimize costs by automatically scaling resources up or down based on demand.

Cons

• Limited Customization: While flexible, it may not be suitable for applications requiring very specific server configurations
• Cost for small applications: it might not be suitable for small applications, but it is better to use EC2 instances.
• Vendor Lock-in: Applications built for Elastic Beanstalk may require some modification to run on other platforms

Elastic Beanstalk Deployment Modes