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Amazon EC2 vs AWS Elastic Beanstalk: What are the differences?
What is Amazon EC2? Scalable, pay-as-you-go compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk? 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.
Amazon EC2 belongs to "Cloud Hosting" category of the tech stack, while AWS Elastic Beanstalk can be primarily classified under "Platform as a Service".
Some of the features offered by Amazon EC2 are:
- Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.
- Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine.
- Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application.
On the other hand, AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides the following key features:
- 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
"Quick and reliable cloud servers" is the top reason why over 644 developers like Amazon EC2, while over 74 developers mention "Integrates with other aws services" as the leading cause for choosing AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
According to the StackShare community, Amazon EC2 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3605 company stacks & 1613 developers stacks; compared to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which is listed in 374 company stacks and 118 developer stacks.
We have an Angular app for our B2B app and I'm unable to understand what to choose and why? currently, we use the Azure Web app. What can be the possible issues with each Stack?
I want to make sure that we have high availability with minimum infrastructure requirements such as load balancers and web servers. But with maximum performance metrics. 1) EC2 will give full control to me but I will have to manage everything on my own. 2) EBS is a more or less managed system but will we lack any less control? 3) S3 is it scalable and can it handle large requests that will need load balancers and what about performance metrics.
Hi Vibhanshu, When it comes to serving a static website, single page application, S3 or a combination of S3/CloudFront, is a great fit. There is no server that you need to manage, and S3 is as resilient and scalable at it gets. Moreover, it's certainly the most cost-effective solution you'll be able to come up with. Is your application fully static or does it come with compute needs? - Regardless, I would highly discourage you from running anything directly on a custom EC2 instance of your own, as this will from the get-go but also over time, come with high maintenance costs. - Elastic Beanstalk, (not to be mistaken with EBS, which acronym stands for Elastic Block Storage), on the contrary, is a rather powerful way to manage your applications and environments. Either via the CLI or through the console, you can easily configure your environment variables, load balancers, certificates, events/thresholds causing your instances counts to scale up/down, steaming of logs... - Elastic Beanstalk supports by default a couple of language, but these don't always allow you to run the version/dependency you need. For best decoupling from the underlying instances, you might want to look at leveraging Docker (Elastic Beanstalk has Docker-compatible AMIs), so you are in control of the stack you application runs on.
As you have only mentioned an Angular app so I'm assuming that you're hosting your backend APIs separately. You can do a production build of the Angular app and put it in S3 (without public access). Next, you can create a CloudFront distribution for this bucket and point a record in your Route53 hosted domain to this distribution. This way your website will be highly available and fast as caching will be available. Note: With this method, you should make sure when you push new build in the bucket, you do not delete the service-worker script or else service worker will stop caching.
I will not recommend using EC2 as it seems overkill for this task. You will have to manage an AMI with Nginx or Apache or some other static web server on your own. You will also have to attach an elastic IP with the instance or an ALB for connecting it to a Cloudfront distribution. Too much work.
You can go with Elastic Beanstalk. It will reduce the setup work but still big resources for an Angular SPA.
As a bonus, you can have multiple Cloudfront distribution+S3 bucket for multiple environments (production, staging, etc.) and use weighted routing in Route 53 record for AB test or blue/green deployments.
DigitalOcean was where I began; its USD5/month is extremely competitive and the overall experience as highly user-friendly.
However, their offerings were lacking and integrating with other resources I had on AWS was getting more costly (due to transfer costs on AWS). Eventually I moved the entire project off DO's Droplets and onto AWS's EC2.
One may initially find the cost (w/o free tier) and interface of AWS daunting however with good planning you can achieve highly cost-efficient systems with savings plans, spot instances, etcetera.
Do not dive into AWS head-first! Seriously, don't. Stand back and read pricing documentation thoroughly. You can, not to the fault of AWS, easily go way overbudget. Your first action upon getting your AWS account should be to set up billing alarms for estimated and current bill totals.
We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.
GCE is much more user friendly than EC2, though Amazon has come a very long way since the early days (pre-2010's). This can be seen in how easy it is to edit the storage attached to an instance in GCE: it's under the instance details and is edited inline. In AWS you have to click the instance > click the storage block device (new screen) > click the edit option (new modal) > resize the volume > confirm (new model) then wait a very long time. Google's is nearly instant.
- In both cases, the instance much be shut down.
There also the preference between "user burden-of-security" and automatic security: AWS goes for the former, GCE the latter.
Most bioinformatics shops nowadays are hosting on AWS or Azure, since they have HIPAA tiers and offer enterprise SLA contracts. Meanwhile Heroku hasn't historically supported HIPAA. Rackspace and Google Cloud would be other hosting providers we would consider, but we just don't get requests for them. So, we mostly focus on AWS and Azure support.
Pros of Amazon EC2
- Quick and reliable cloud servers646
- Scalability515
- Easy management393
- Low cost277
- Auto-scaling270
- Market leader89
- Backed by amazon80
- Reliable79
- Free tier67
- Easy management, scalability58
- Flexible13
- Easy to Start10
- Widely used9
- Web-scale9
- Elastic9
- Node.js API7
- Industry Standard5
- Lots of configuration options4
- GPU instances2
- Extremely simple to use1
- Amazing for individuals1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
- Simpler to understand and learn1
Pros of AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- Integrates with other aws services77
- Simple deployment65
- Fast44
- Painless28
- Free16
- Well-documented4
- Independend app container3
- Postgres hosting2
- Ability to be customized2
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Cons of Amazon EC2
- Ui could use a lot of work13
- High learning curve when compared to PaaS6
- Extremely poor CPU performance3
Cons of AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- Charges appear automatically after exceeding free quota2
- Lots of moving parts and config1
- Slow deployments0
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