AWS CloudFormation vs AWS Elastic Beanstalk: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown document, we will discuss the key differences between AWS CloudFormation and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

1. Scalability and Deployment Model: AWS CloudFormation is primarily used for managing infrastructure as code, allowing users to provision and manage a broad range of AWS resources. It provides a way to create, update, and delete resources in a consistent and predictable manner, making it suitable for managing complex infrastructure deployments. On the other hand, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an application deployment platform that automates the setup and management of the underlying infrastructure required to run applications. It abstracts away the complexity of infrastructure management and provides a simplified and automated deployment model for web applications.

2. Level of Control: With AWS CloudFormation, users have fine-grained control over the infrastructure provisioning and management process. They can define the exact resources, configurations, and dependencies needed for their application stack. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, on the other hand, provides a higher level of abstraction, automatically handling the provisioning and configuration of resources based on predefined platform-specific templates. This reduces the level of control but simplifies the deployment process.

3. Application Type: AWS CloudFormation is suitable for deploying a wide range of application stacks, including single or multi-tier architectures, microservices, and serverless applications. It supports various resource types and allows users to define custom templates to create a highly customized infrastructure setup. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, on the other hand, is more focused on web application deployment. It provides pre-configured platforms for popular languages and frameworks, simplifying the deployment process for web applications.

4. Environment Management: AWS CloudFormation manages infrastructure resources, allowing users to create and manage different environments within a stack. Each environment can have its own set of resources and configurations, allowing for easy management of different stages of the application lifecycle such as development, testing, and production. AWS Elastic Beanstalk also provides environment management capabilities but is more focused on the deployment and management of application versions within an environment.

5. Deployment Options: AWS CloudFormation supports both rollback and drift detection features. Rollback helps in automatically reverting to a previous stack state in case of failures during updates, ensuring consistency and minimizing downtime. Drift detection helps in identifying any manual modifications made to the stack resources, providing visibility into the changes that are not managed by CloudFormation. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, on the other hand, focuses on providing seamless deployments by handling rolling updates, automated capacity management, and load balancing, ensuring availability and minimizing disruptions during deployments.

6. Flexibility and Extensibility: AWS CloudFormation provides a highly flexible and extensible framework for managing infrastructure. It supports AWS CloudFormation StackSets, allowing users to deploy stacks across multiple accounts and regions. It also integrates well with other AWS services and can provision resources from more than 170 AWS service types. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, on the other hand, is a more opinionated platform that provides pre-configured environments and focuses on ease of use. Although it allows some level of customization, it may not offer the same level of flexibility and extensibility as AWS CloudFormation.

Overall, while AWS CloudFormation is a powerful tool for managing infrastructure resources in a wide range of application architectures, AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides a simpler and more streamlined approach specifically targeted towards web application deployment. The choice between the two largely depends on the level of control, flexibility, and automation required for the application deployment process.