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AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Kubernetes are two popular platforms for deploying and managing applications. Here are key differences between them:

1. **Abstraction Level**: AWS Elastic Beanstalk operates at a higher level of abstraction, providing a PaaS-like experience where developers can easily deploy applications without worrying about infrastructure. In contrast, Kubernetes offers a lower level of abstraction, giving users more control over the infrastructure and configurations.

2. **Scalability**: Elastic Beanstalk is designed to automatically handle application scaling based on user-defined metrics, making it easier for users to scale their applications without manual intervention. Kubernetes, on the other hand, requires users to set up and manage their own scaling mechanisms through horizontal pod autoscaling and cluster scaling.

3. **Ecosystem and Community**: Kubernetes has a larger and more active open-source community compared to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, leading to quicker adoption of new features, better support, and a wider range of third-party tools and integrations available for Kubernetes users.

4. **Portability**: Kubernetes provides more portability and flexibility in terms of deploying applications across different cloud providers and on-premises environments. Elastic Beanstalk is more tailored towards AWS services and may not offer the same level of portability for applications.

5. **Management Complexity**: Elastic Beanstalk abstracts away many of the complexities involved in application deployment and management, making it simpler and quicker to deploy applications. Kubernetes, while offering more control, requires a higher level of expertise to manage containers, pods, and clusters effectively.

6. **Cost**: Elastic Beanstalk may have a lower cost of entry for small applications due to its simplicity and managed services, whereas Kubernetes can be more cost-effective for larger applications that require fine-grained control over resources and scaling.

In Summary, AWS Elastic Beanstalk offers a higher level of abstraction and simplicity for deploying applications, while Kubernetes provides more control, scalability, and portability for users with more advanced deployment needs.

Decisions about AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Kubernetes
Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 10.5M views

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

  • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
  • Respectively Git as revision control system
  • SourceTree as Git GUI
  • Visual Studio Code as IDE
  • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
  • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
  • SonarQube as quality gate
  • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
  • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
  • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
  • Heroku for deploying in test environments
  • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
  • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
  • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
  • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
  • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

  • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
  • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
  • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
  • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
  • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
  • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
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Pros of AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Pros of Kubernetes
  • 77
    Integrates with other aws services
  • 65
    Simple deployment
  • 44
    Fast
  • 28
    Painless
  • 16
    Free
  • 4
    Well-documented
  • 3
    Independend app container
  • 2
    Postgres hosting
  • 2
    Ability to be customized
  • 166
    Leading docker container management solution
  • 129
    Simple and powerful
  • 107
    Open source
  • 76
    Backed by google
  • 58
    The right abstractions
  • 25
    Scale services
  • 20
    Replication controller
  • 11
    Permission managment
  • 9
    Supports autoscaling
  • 8
    Simple
  • 8
    Cheap
  • 6
    Self-healing
  • 5
    Open, powerful, stable
  • 5
    Reliable
  • 5
    No cloud platform lock-in
  • 5
    Promotes modern/good infrascture practice
  • 4
    Scalable
  • 4
    Quick cloud setup
  • 3
    Custom and extensibility
  • 3
    Captain of Container Ship
  • 3
    Cloud Agnostic
  • 3
    Backed by Red Hat
  • 3
    Runs on azure
  • 3
    A self healing environment with rich metadata
  • 2
    Everything of CaaS
  • 2
    Gke
  • 2
    Golang
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Expandable
  • 2
    Sfg

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Cons of AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Cons of Kubernetes
  • 2
    Charges appear automatically after exceeding free quota
  • 1
    Lots of moving parts and config
  • 0
    Slow deployments
  • 16
    Steep learning curve
  • 15
    Poor workflow for development
  • 8
    Orchestrates only infrastructure
  • 4
    High resource requirements for on-prem clusters
  • 2
    Too heavy for simple systems
  • 1
    Additional vendor lock-in (Docker)
  • 1
    More moving parts to secure
  • 1
    Additional Technology Overhead

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What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

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What companies use AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
What companies use Kubernetes?
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What tools integrate with AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
What tools integrate with Kubernetes?

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What are some alternatives to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Kubernetes?
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.
AWS CodeDeploy
AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates code deployments to Amazon EC2 instances. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications.
Docker
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
AWS CloudFormation
You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.
Azure App Service
Quickly build, deploy, and scale web apps created with popular frameworks .NET, .NET Core, Node.js, Java, PHP, Ruby, or Python, in containers or running on any operating system. Meet rigorous, enterprise-grade performance, security, and compliance requirements by using the fully managed platform for your operational and monitoring tasks.
See all alternatives