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AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Azure Websites vs Heroku: What are the differences?
Scalability: AWS Elastic Beanstalk offers auto-scaling and load balancing capabilities, making it easier to handle fluctuating traffic levels and ensuring optimal performance for your application. Azure Websites also provide auto-scaling options, but Heroku follows a different model based on the concept of dynos, which are containers running web processes that can be scaled up or down based on demand.
Pricing Structure: Each platform has its pricing structure, with AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Azure Websites typically charging based on usage such as server instances, storage, and data transfer. Heroku, on the other hand, uses a more straightforward pricing model based on the number of dynos and add-ons required for your application.
Platform Support: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is specifically designed to work with Amazon Web Services, offering seamless integration with other AWS services. Azure Websites is part of the Azure platform and benefits from deep integration with other Azure services such as databases, storage, and monitoring tools. Heroku, while offering flexibility in language support, may have limitations in integrating with specific services outside its ecosystem.
Deployment Options: AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides support for deploying applications in multiple programming languages and containers, giving developers more flexibility in their choice of technology stack. Azure Websites also supports various programming languages and frameworks, but Heroku tends to be more developer-friendly with its simplified deployment process, particularly for web applications written in Ruby on Rails.
Customization and Control: AWS Elastic Beanstalk allows developers to have more control over the underlying infrastructure, making it suitable for experienced users who need specific configurations. Azure Websites offers a balance between ease of use and customization options, while Heroku focuses on simplicity and abstracting away infrastructure concerns for developers.
Monitoring and Management: AWS Elastic Beanstalk offers detailed monitoring tools and integration with AWS CloudWatch for tracking application performance and health. Azure Websites provides similar monitoring capabilities through Azure Monitor, while Heroku includes built-in metrics and logging features to help developers troubleshoot issues effectively.
In Summary, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Azure Websites, and Heroku differ in terms of scalability, pricing structure, platform support, deployment options, customization and control, as well as monitoring and management capabilities, catering to different needs and preferences in deploying web applications.
The Friendliest.app started on Heroku (both app and db) like most of my projects. The db on Heroku was on the cusp of becoming prohibitively expensive for this project.
After looking at options and reading recommendations we settled on Render to host both the application and db. Render's pricing model seems to scale more linearly with the application instead of the large pricing/performance jumps experienced with Heroku.
Migration to Render was extremely easy and we were able to complete both the db and application moves within 24 hours.
The only thing we're really missing on Render is a CLI. With Heroku, we could manage everything from the command line in VSCode. With Render, you need to use the web shell they provide.
I'm transitioning to Render from heroku. The pricing scale matches my usage scale, yet it's just as easy to deploy. It's removed a lot of the devops that I don't like to deal with on setting up my own raw *nix box and makes deployment simple and easy!
Clustering I don't use clustering features at the moment but when i need to set up clustering of nodes and discoverability, render will enable that where Heroku would require that I use an external service like redis.
Restarts The restarts are annoying. I understand the reasoning, but I'd rather watch my service if its got a memory leak and work to fix it than to just assume that it has memory leaks and needs to restart.
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
Pros of Azure Websites
- Ease of deployment17
- Free plans for students6
Pros of Heroku
- Easy deployment703
- Free for side projects459
- Huge time-saver374
- Simple scaling348
- Low devops skills required261
- Easy setup190
- Add-ons for almost everything174
- Beginner friendly153
- Better for startups150
- Low learning curve133
- Postgres hosting48
- Easy to add collaborators41
- Faster development30
- Awesome documentation24
- Simple rollback19
- Focus on product, not deployment19
- Natural companion for rails development15
- Easy integration15
- Great customer support12
- GitHub integration8
- Painless & well documented6
- No-ops6
- I love that they make it free to launch a side project4
- Free4
- Great UI3
- Just works3
- PostgreSQL forking and following2
- MySQL extension2
- Security1
- Able to host stuff good like Discord Bot1
- Sec0
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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 Azure Websites
Cons of Heroku
- Super expensive27
- Not a whole lot of flexibility9
- No usable MySQL option7
- Storage7
- Low performance on free tier5
- 24/7 support is $1,000 per month2