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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
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  4. Platform As A Service
  5. AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Terraform

AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Terraform

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Stacks2.1K
Followers1.8K
Votes241
Terraform
Terraform
Stacks22.9K
Followers14.7K
Votes344
GitHub Stars47.0K
Forks10.1K

AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Terraform: What are the differences?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Terraform are both popular tools used in the deployment and management of cloud-based infrastructure. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two.
  1. Deployment Management: AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides a fully managed platform for deploying web applications, abstracting away much of the underlying infrastructure management. It automates application deployment, capacity provisioning, load balancing, and scaling, making it ideal for developers who want a simplified deployment process. On the other hand, Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that enables users to define and provision infrastructure resources across multiple cloud providers. It provides greater flexibility and control over the deployment process, allowing users to manage infrastructure more granularly.

  2. Vendor Lock-In: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), so using it binds users to the AWS ecosystem. While this can be beneficial for users who prefer an integrated AWS environment, it can also limit flexibility for those who want to leverage different cloud providers or use a hybrid cloud approach. In contrast, Terraform is provider-agnostic, allowing users to deploy and manage resources on various cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others. This makes it suitable for organizations with multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies, as they can avoid vendor lock-in and easily migrate between providers.

  3. Resource Management: With AWS Elastic Beanstalk, users can focus primarily on application deployment and let the service handle resource provisioning and management. Elastic Beanstalk abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, automatically scaling resources based on application demand. Conversely, Terraform enables users to define infrastructure resources in a declarative language, giving them full control over resource management. Users can specify the desired state of their infrastructure and use Terraform to create and manage resources accordingly. This level of control allows for more customization and enables advanced infrastructure orchestration.

  4. Learning Curve: AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides a simplified and opinionated interface for deploying applications, making it easier for developers to get started quickly. It requires less knowledge of infrastructure management, making it suitable for individuals who are primarily focused on application development rather than infrastructure configuration. In contrast, Terraform has a steeper learning curve, as it requires users to have a solid understanding of infrastructure as code and configuration management. While this may require more upfront investment in learning, it provides users with greater flexibility and control over infrastructure deployment.

  5. Integration with Other Tools: AWS Elastic Beanstalk integrates well with other AWS services, leveraging the AWS ecosystem for additional features and functionality. It seamlessly integrates with services like AWS RDS, S3, and CloudWatch, simplifying the management and configuration of these resources. On the other hand, Terraform also provides integration with various cloud providers and infrastructure-related tools. It allows users to automate the deployment and configuration of resources beyond AWS services and provides a consistent interface for managing infrastructure across different platforms.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: AWS Elastic Beanstalk benefits from being a managed service provided by AWS, which offers comprehensive documentation, support, and an extensive user community. This makes it easier to find resources, get help, and troubleshoot any issues. Terraform, as an open-source tool, also has a vibrant community and ecosystem. It benefits from contributions from a wide range of developers, offering extensive documentation, modules, and plugins. This active community ensures continuous improvement, innovation, and support for Terraform.

In Summary, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a managed service that simplifies deployment management, whereas Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that provides greater control and flexibility over resource provisioning. Elastic Beanstalk promotes ease of use and quick deployment in the AWS ecosystem, while Terraform enables multi-cloud support, granular control, and advanced automation capabilities.

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Detailed Comparison

AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Terraform
Terraform

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

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.

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.
Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax. This allows a blueprint of your datacenter to be versioned and treated as you would any other code. Additionally, infrastructure can be shared and re-used.;Execution Plans: Terraform has a "planning" step where it generates an execution plan. The execution plan shows what Terraform will do when you call apply. This lets you avoid any surprises when Terraform manipulates infrastructure.;Resource Graph: Terraform builds a graph of all your resources, and parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources. Because of this, Terraform builds infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and operators get insight into dependencies in their infrastructure.;Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what Terraform will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
47.0K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
10.1K
Stacks
2.1K
Stacks
22.9K
Followers
1.8K
Followers
14.7K
Votes
241
Votes
344
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
  • 121
    Infrastructure as code
  • 73
    Declarative syntax
  • 45
    Planning
  • 28
    Simple
  • 24
    Parallelism
Cons
  • 1
    Doesn't have full support to GKE
Integrations
Docker
Docker
Papertrail
Papertrail
Heroku
Heroku
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
CloudFlare
CloudFlare
DNSimple
DNSimple
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Consul
Consul
Equinix Metal
Equinix Metal
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
OpenStack
OpenStack
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine

What are some alternatives to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Terraform?

Heroku

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

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

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 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

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

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.

Capistrano

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 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

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.

Render

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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