Advantages of Using Elastic Beanstalk and How to Use it

Elastic Beanstalk makes it even easier for developers to quickly deploy and manage applications in the cloud. Developers simply upload their application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Advantages of Using Beanstalk

1.  Fast Configuration with Automation

Elastic Beanstalk automates the setup, configuration, and provisioning of other services to create a web service. You can log into your application, and have a new site up and accessible in less than an hour. Elastic Beanstalk also creates a fairly standard configuration for a modern Rails application.

This automation can save precious time by handling all the things that need to be completed for a production app (configuring log file rotations, nginx config files, puma service configuration, linux package installation, ruby installation, load balancer configuration, and database setup).

2.  Powerful Customization

With Elastic Beanstalk, it’s all under your control. You can update your database config file. You can update the security group for all of the machines, so that, for example, the entire application is only accessible from your office IP address.

3.  Reasonable Price and High Flexibility

Elastic Beanstalk has reasonable price and great flexibility. The platform itself is nothing, so there is no extra charge. Also, because you can pick your instance size, as well as easily add more front-end servers to the load balancer, you can easily match your server needs to your service load. Elastic Beanstalk even has auto-scaling functionality built in, which we never used, but would be a great way to save money for larger applications by only bringing up extra servers when needed. Overall, our costs on an application with a similar size and scope we built during the same timeframe was 400% higher on Heroku vs. Elastic Beanstalk. Although each application is different, it’s a good ballpark comparison.

How to use Elastic Beanstalk?

To use Elastic Beanstalk, you create an application, upload an application version in the form of an application source bundle (for example, a Java .war file) to Elastic Beanstalk, and then provide some information about the application. Elastic Beanstalk automatically launches an environment and creates and configures the resources needed to run your code. After your environment is launched, you can then manage your environment and deploy new application versions. The following diagram illustrates the workflow of Elastic Beanstalk.

Example Use Cases

Scenario 1 : Customer wants a web application without having to worry about the underlying infrastruture

Elastic Beanstalk can be deployed quickly for a customer and provides a lot of functionality that would otherwise take a longer time to set up and maintain.

Blue / green deployment

Load balancer

Health checks / Monitoring

Auto scaling / auto healing instances

Integration with deployment tools such as Git and Visual Studio

Managed updates

Security Groups

Networking / VPC Configuration

Log Rotation

X-Ray

If the customer just needs a stable application deployed and doesn’t need any more complexity, then Elastic Beanstalk can be a good candidate to get a lot of the best practices covered in an efficient manner.

Limitations

As Elastic Beanstalk is trying to be a simpler way of handing applications, there are some drawbacks if you need more complexity.

1.       Changes are designed to be straightforward, but this can sometimes mean that not all of the information about issues is presented in Elastic Beanstalk

2.       Limited set of deployment software targets

3.       Issues with deployments / scaling issues can be more complicated to resolve due to more limited information provided