Manual deployment vs. Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Question

What are the advantages we get by using Elastic Beanstalk over maually creating EC2 instance and setting up tomcat server and deploy etc for a typical java web applicaion. A

Answer 1

I had an app deployed both in EC2 dedicated(Nginx & Gunicorn) and Beanstalk Environment(CentOS & Apache2).

My observations:

• BeanStalk is Paas. Manually creating an EC2 instance(IAAS), is like doing everything from scratch, but you have solid control.

• BeanStalk comes with by default CentOS and Apache(Httpd). You could choose OS in dedicated instance.

• These things that mattered to me,

  • There were lots of 504 errors showing up in Beanstalk environment.
  • It was difficult to debug when BeanStalk server crashed, as logs would also not show up and could not ssh into machine. This is very important.
  • Installing/configuring tools like Celery, Redis (need to run another port) etc.,. in dedicated instance is lot more easier.

• In my case, I had to scale up (Beanstalk)server in order to run installation of some packages(like pandoc). These things are more simpler in Ubuntu.

• Scaling is a lot more easier in BeanStalk. Cloning servers is straightforward in BeanStalk.

• I had taken micro in both the cases (dedicated & Beanstalk). I felt dedicated micro instance was better.

• Automated deployment in Beanstalk. I had to write scripts to automate the same, which is fine, since it is only once.