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Amazon EC2 vs Beanstalk: What are the differences?
Developers describe Amazon EC2 as "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. On the other hand, Beanstalk is detailed as "Private code hosting for teams". A single process to commit code, review with the team, and deploy the final result to your customers.
Amazon EC2 and Beanstalk are primarily classified as "Cloud Hosting" and "Code Collaboration & Version Control" tools respectively.
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, Beanstalk provides the following key features:
- Setup and manage repositories- Import or create Subversion and Git repositories that are instantly available to your team.
- Invite team members, partners & clients- Restrict access to certain repos and provide read-only or full read/write permissions.
- Browse files and changes- Every version of every file you’ve committed to Beanstalk is just a click away. See a timeline of who made changes and view the differences between revisions. Syntax highlighting for over 70 languages.
"Quick and reliable cloud servers" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon EC2 over the competitors, whereas "Ftp deploy" was stated as the key factor in picking Beanstalk.
Airbnb, Uber Technologies, and Netflix are some of the popular companies that use Amazon EC2, whereas Beanstalk is used by Accenture, Docplanner, and UNION. Amazon EC2 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3607 company stacks & 1619 developers stacks; compared to Beanstalk, which is listed in 21 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.
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 servers647
- Scalability515
- Easy management393
- Low cost277
- Auto-scaling271
- 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
- Simpler to understand and learn1
- Extremely simple to use1
- Amazing for individuals1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
Pros of Beanstalk
- Ftp deploy14
- Deployment9
- Easy to navigate8
- Code Editing4
- HipChat Integration4
- Integrations4
- Code review3
- HTML Preview2
- Security1
- Blame Tool1
- Cohesion1
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Cons of Amazon EC2
- Ui could use a lot of work14
- High learning curve when compared to PaaS6
- Extremely poor CPU performance3
Cons of Beanstalk
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What is Amazon EC2?
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