AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs AWS OpsWorks

Overview

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Stacks2.1K

Followers1.8K

Votes241

AWS OpsWorks

Stacks196

Followers222

Votes51

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

Introduction

When it comes to deploying and managing applications on the AWS cloud, two popular options are AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS OpsWorks. Both services offer different approaches to application management, scaling, and automation. Understanding the key differences between them can help you choose the right tool for your specific needs.

Management Approach: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on the application code. In contrast, AWS OpsWorks is a Configuration Management service that follows an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach, giving users more control over the configuration and management of the underlying resources.
Scalability and Flexibility: Elastic Beanstalk is designed to be easy to use and scales applications automatically based on predefined configurations. OpsWorks, on the other hand, provides more flexibility in terms of customization and scaling options, allowing users to define custom stacks, layer configurations, and scaling rules to meet specific requirements.
Supported Technologies: Elastic Beanstalk supports a limited set of programming languages and frameworks, such as Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Ruby, etc., making it ideal for web applications. OpsWorks, on the other hand, offers more flexibility by supporting a wider range of technologies and allows users to bring their own Chef recipes and cookbooks for configuration.
Cost Structure: Elastic Beanstalk is a fully managed service with no additional charges for the underlying infrastructure, as users only pay for the AWS resources consumed by their applications. OpsWorks follows a different pricing model, where users pay for the AWS resources used by the instances managed by OpsWorks, along with additional charges for OpsWorks-related features like Automation, Monitoring, and Security.
Automation and Customization: While Elastic Beanstalk focuses on streamlining the deployment and management of applications with minimal configuration, OpsWorks offers more automation capabilities through Chef recipes, allowing users to automate complex configuration tasks and set up custom deployment workflows with greater control and customization.
Integration with Other AWS Services: Elastic Beanstalk integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, and RDS, providing a simplified and integrated solution for deploying and scaling applications. OpsWorks offers similar integrations but provides more flexibility in how these services are integrated and configured within the OpsWorks stacks.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS OpsWorks can help organizations make informed decisions when choosing the right tool for deploying and managing their applications on the AWS cloud.

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Advice on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS OpsWorks

Nick

CTO at Pickio

Jun 4, 2020

Decided

Initially, we were running our infra on an OpsWorks as we had some (very little, to be honest) experience with it. Unfortunately, it's really hard to scale OpsWorks without good knowledge of Chef, so we moved to EB. Everything was ok with it unless we faced an unexpected downtime one day and we were unable to identify the problem. Access to logs was locked and instances were severe/degraded and stuck in this state, deploys didn't work and the whole service was down and frozen. At this point we decided, that its a great time to move to Docker and EKS. Luckily, at current scale it took not so much time to containerize server app and launch it on EKS – we migrated to EKS within 2.5 full days.

Wrapping up: lack of good knowledge of Chef and poor reliability and accessibility of AWS EB forced us to move to EKS which works perfectly fine now and covers all our needs, plus it is much more flexible and reliable in terms of scalability and management. We now can track everything that happens with infra with no pain, integrate any additional logging solutions and be sure, that even if something go wrong, we'll be able at least identify the problem and fix it ASAP instead of trying to fight with the service itself.

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Detailed Comparison

AWS Elastic Beanstalk	AWS OpsWorks
Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.	Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component
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;Impossible to outgrow – Elastic Beanstalk automatically scales your application up and down based on default Auto Scaling settings;Complete control – Elastic Beanstalk lets you "open the hood" and retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application;Flexible – You have the freedom to select the Amazon EC2 instance type that is optimal for your application based on CPU and memory requirements, and can choose from several available database options;Reliable – Elastic Beanstalk runs within Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters, and provides an environment where developers can run applications requiring high durability and availability.	AWS OpsWorks lets you model the different components of your application as layers in a stack, and maps your logical architecture to a physical architecture. You can see all resources associated with your application, and their status, in one place.;AWS OpsWorks provides an event-driven configuration system with rich deployment tools that allow you to efficiently manage your applications over their lifetime, including support for customizable deployments, rollback, partial deployments, patch management, automatic instance scaling, and auto healing.;AWS OpsWorks lets you define template configurations for your entire environment in a format that you can maintain and version just like your application source code.;AWS OpsWorks supports any software that has a scripted installation. Because OpsWorks uses the Chef framework, you can bring your own recipes or leverage hundreds of community-built configurations.
Statistics
Stacks 2.1K	Stacks 196
Followers 1.8K	Followers 222
Votes 241	Votes 51
Pros & Cons
Pros 77 Integrates with other aws services 65 Simple deployment 44 Fast 28 Painless 16 Free Cons 2 Charges appear automatically after exceeding free quota 1 Lots of moving parts and config 0 Slow deployments	Pros 32 Devops 19 Cloud management
Integrations
Docker Papertrail	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS OpsWorks?

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Related Comparisons

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

Introduction

Management Approach: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on the application code. In contrast, AWS OpsWorks is a Configuration Management service that follows an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach, giving users more control over the configuration and management of the underlying resources.
Scalability and Flexibility: Elastic Beanstalk is designed to be easy to use and scales applications automatically based on predefined configurations. OpsWorks, on the other hand, provides more flexibility in terms of customization and scaling options, allowing users to define custom stacks, layer configurations, and scaling rules to meet specific requirements.
Supported Technologies: Elastic Beanstalk supports a limited set of programming languages and frameworks, such as Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Ruby, etc., making it ideal for web applications. OpsWorks, on the other hand, offers more flexibility by supporting a wider range of technologies and allows users to bring their own Chef recipes and cookbooks for configuration.
Cost Structure: Elastic Beanstalk is a fully managed service with no additional charges for the underlying infrastructure, as users only pay for the AWS resources consumed by their applications. OpsWorks follows a different pricing model, where users pay for the AWS resources used by the instances managed by OpsWorks, along with additional charges for OpsWorks-related features like Automation, Monitoring, and Security.
Automation and Customization: While Elastic Beanstalk focuses on streamlining the deployment and management of applications with minimal configuration, OpsWorks offers more automation capabilities through Chef recipes, allowing users to automate complex configuration tasks and set up custom deployment workflows with greater control and customization.
Integration with Other AWS Services: Elastic Beanstalk integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, and RDS, providing a simplified and integrated solution for deploying and scaling applications. OpsWorks offers similar integrations but provides more flexibility in how these services are integrated and configured within the OpsWorks stacks.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs AWS OpsWorks

Overview

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