AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs DigitalOcean

Overview

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Stacks2.1K

Followers1.8K

Votes241

DigitalOcean

Stacks18.2K

Followers13.3K

Votes2.6K

AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs DigitalOcean: What are the differences?

Introduction

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and DigitalOcean are both popular cloud platforms that offer compute resources to deploy and manage applications. However, there are several key differences between the two services that make them unique in their own ways.

Pricing and Billing Models: AWS Elastic Beanstalk follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model where customers are charged based on the resources used. On the other hand, DigitalOcean has a fixed pricing model where customers pay a predefined amount for a specific configuration of resources. This makes DigitalOcean a more cost-effective choice for small-scale applications with predictable resource requirements.
Platform Flexibility: Elastic Beanstalk is built on top of the AWS infrastructure, providing a wide range of services and integrations with other AWS offerings. This allows users to leverage additional services like RDS, S3, and DynamoDB seamlessly. DigitalOcean, on the other hand, is a standalone cloud platform that focuses solely on providing virtual servers. It offers a simpler and more straightforward experience but lacks the extensive service ecosystem provided by AWS.
Scaling Options: Elastic Beanstalk provides a variety of scaling options, including manual scaling, automatic scaling, and scheduled scaling. This allows users to adjust the capacity of their application based on demand. DigitalOcean, on the other hand, offers only manual scaling where users have to manually provision and de-provision resources as needed. This difference gives Elastic Beanstalk an advantage for applications with fluctuating traffic patterns.
Managed Environment: Elastic Beanstalk offers a fully managed environment where AWS handles the underlying infrastructure, including patching, security updates, and server management. This allows developers to focus more on application development and less on infrastructure maintenance. In contrast, DigitalOcean provides unmanaged virtual servers, requiring users to take care of the server management tasks themselves. This gives Elastic Beanstalk an edge for developers who prefer a more hands-off approach.
Ease of Use: Elastic Beanstalk provides a simplified deployment process with built-in support for various programming languages, frameworks, and application stacks. It offers an intuitive web interface and CLI tools for managing applications, making it easier for developers to get started. DigitalOcean also offers a user-friendly interface but lacks the same level of built-in support for application deployment. This makes Elastic Beanstalk a more beginner-friendly option.
Global Infrastructure: AWS Elastic Beanstalk has a vast global infrastructure with data centers and regions distributed worldwide. This allows users to deploy their applications closer to their target audience, reducing latency and improving performance. DigitalOcean, although expanding its global presence, has a more limited number of data centers compared to AWS. This difference makes Elastic Beanstalk a more suitable choice for applications with global user bases.

In summary, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and DigitalOcean differ in their pricing models, platform flexibility, scaling options, managed environments, ease of use, and global infrastructure. While Elastic Beanstalk provides a fully managed environment with extensive integration possibilities, DigitalOcean offers a simpler and cost-effective solution for smaller applications with predictable resource needs.

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Advice on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, DigitalOcean

Jerome/Zen

Software Engineer

Aug 2, 2020

Needs advice

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.

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Detailed Comparison

AWS Elastic Beanstalk	DigitalOcean
Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.	We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.
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.	We provide all of our users with high-performance SSD Hard Drives, flexible API, and the ability to select to nearest data center location.;SSD Cloud Servers in 55 Seconds;We provide a 99.99% uptime SLA around network, power and virtual server availability. If we fail to deliver, we’ll credit you based on the amount of time that service was unavailable.;All servers come with 1Gb/sec. network interface. Plans start with 1TB per month and increase incrementally.;KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is one of the fastest-growing open source full virtualization solution for Linux. Our KVM virtualized droplets are designed to address a high level of security and performance.;With our SSD hard drives, you can expect much faster disk i/o performance when compared to a traditional storage medium (e.g. SATA).;We have created a simple name spaced API that provides complete control over your virtual private servers.;All cloud servers are built on powerful Hex Core machines with dedicated ECC Ram and RAID SSD storage.;Shared Private Networking enables Droplets to communicate with other Droplets in that same datacenter.;Transfer a copy of your Droplet snapshot to all regions (Amsterdam, San Francisco, and New York).;An intuitive user interface to control all of your virtual servers. Create, resize, rebuild and snapshot with single clicks.;Full featured DNS management allows you to easily manage your domains.;If you ever get locked out of your virtual server, you’ll be able to recover it with full console access.;Automatically set your server to be backed up. Or take a snapshot when you reach a milestone.
Statistics
Stacks 2.1K	Stacks 18.2K
Followers 1.8K	Followers 13.3K
Votes 241	Votes 2.6K
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 560 Great value for money 364 Simple dashboard 362 Good pricing 300 Ssds 250 Nice ui Cons 4 Pricing 3 No live support chat
Integrations
Docker Papertrail	Cloud 66

What are some alternatives to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, DigitalOcean?

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.

Amazon EC2

It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

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.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

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.

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

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