AWS has a beautiful feature named Elastic Beanstalk to deploy application in AWS cloud with minimal knowledge on environment setup. Currently it supports Ruby, Java, Node.js, python and PHP applications. But the question is, “should we use Elastic Beanstalk for a low/ medium traffic application?”
Advantage:
- The Elastic Beanstalk is a fully automatic feature for application deployment and versioning
- AWS has pre-setup templates that can be used like LAMP stack, Ruby Stack
- Helps to provide single management interface to monitor the activity of your environments like EC2, ELB and S3
Disadvantage:
- Since this does not support micro instance the cost of for Small instance or higher configuration instance to AWS is redundant
- There are some limitations to customize the ELB after deployment.
- AWS scales up and down the resources based on metrics. It supports Elastic Beanstalk on a single metric.
- AutoScaling cannot be configured with CPU parameters and Network traffic.
Finally, it can be said that Elastic beanstalk is the best fit for application environments that require very little customization with heavy traffic. As it doesn’t support Micro instances, so it is advisable to use customizable environments for low traffic applications.