AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Capistrano: What are the differences?

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): Automatically distribute your incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task; Capistrano: A remote server automation and deployment tool written in Ruby. 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.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) can be classified as a tool in the "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy" category, while Capistrano is grouped under "Server Configuration and Automation".

Some of the features offered by AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) are:

• Distribution of requests to Amazon EC2 instances (servers) in multiple Availability Zones so that the risk of overloading one single instance is minimized. And if an entire Availability Zone goes offline, Elastic Load Balancing routes traffic to instances in other Availability Zones.
• Continuous monitoring of the health of Amazon EC2 instances registered with the load balancer so that requests are sent only to the healthy instances. If an instance becomes unhealthy, Elastic Load Balancing stops sending traffic to that instance and spreads the load across the remaining healthy instances.
• Support for end-to-end traffic encryption on those networks that use secure (HTTPS/SSL) connections.

On the other hand, Capistrano provides the following key features:

• Reliably deploy web application to any number of machines simultaneously, in sequence or as a rolling set
• Automate audits of any number of machines (checking login logs, enumerating uptimes, and/or applying security patches)
• Script arbitrary workflows over SSH

"Easy" is the top reason why over 46 developers like AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), while over 122 developers mention "Automated deployment with several custom recipes" as the leading cause for choosing Capistrano.

Capistrano is an open source tool with 11.1K GitHub stars and 1.71K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Capistrano's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) has a broader approval, being mentioned in 723 company stacks & 314 developers stacks; compared to Capistrano, which is listed in 293 company stacks and 81 developer stacks.