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AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs AWS Lambda: What are the differences?
Developers describe AWS Elastic Beanstalk as "Quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud". Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. On the other hand, AWS Lambda is detailed as "Automatically run code in response to modifications to objects in Amazon S3 buckets, messages in Kinesis streams, or updates in DynamoDB". AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk can be classified as a tool in the "Platform as a Service" category, while AWS Lambda is grouped under "Serverless / Task Processing".
Some of the features offered by AWS Elastic Beanstalk are:
- Elastic Beanstalk is built using familiar software stacks such as the Apache HTTP Server for Node.js, PHP and Python, Passenger for Ruby, IIS 7.5 for .NET, and Apache Tomcat for Java
- There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk - you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications.
- Easy to begin – Elastic Beanstalk is a quick and simple way to deploy your application to AWS. You simply use the AWS Management Console, Git deployment, or an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Eclipse or Visual Studio to upload your application
On the other hand, AWS Lambda provides the following key features:
- Extend other AWS services with custom logic
- Build custom back-end services
- Completely Automated Administration
"Integrates with other aws services" is the top reason why over 74 developers like AWS Elastic Beanstalk, while over 121 developers mention "No infrastructure" as the leading cause for choosing AWS Lambda.
According to the StackShare community, AWS Lambda has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1023 company stacks & 614 developers stacks; compared to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which is listed in 374 company stacks and 119 developer stacks.
When adding a new feature to Checkly rearchitecting some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda . The short story:
- Developer Experience trumps everything.
- AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
- If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.
Recently, I was doing a brainstorm at a startup here in Berlin on the future of their infrastructure. They were ready to move on from their initial, almost 100% Ec2 + Chef based setup. Everything was on the table. But we crossed out a lot quite quickly:
- Pure, uncut, self hosted Kubernetes — way too much complexity
- Managed Kubernetes in various flavors — still too much complexity
- Zeit — Maybe, but no Docker support
- Elastic Beanstalk — Maybe, bit old but does the job
- Heroku
- Lambda
It became clear a mix of PaaS and FaaS was the way to go. What a surprise! That is exactly what I use for Checkly! But when do you pick which model?
I chopped that question up into the following categories:
- Developer Experience / DX 🤓
- Ops Experience / OX 🐂 (?)
- Cost 💵
- Lock in 🔐
Read the full post linked below for all details
Pros of AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- Integrates with other aws services77
- Simple deployment65
- Fast44
- Painless28
- Free16
- Independend app container3
- Well-documented3
- Ability to be customized2
- Postgres hosting2
Pros of AWS Lambda
- No infrastructure127
- Cheap82
- Quick69
- Stateless57
- No deploy, no server, great sleep47
- AWS Lambda went down taking many sites with it9
- Event Driven Governance6
- Auto scale and cost effective5
- Extensive API5
- Easy to deploy5
- VPC Support4
- Integrated with various AWS services2
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Cons of AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- Charges appear automatically after exceeding free quota2
- Lots of moving parts and config1
- Slow deployments0
Cons of AWS Lambda
- Cant execute ruby or go5
- Can't execute PHP w/o significant effort0
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What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
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