Elastic Beanstalk Elastic Beanstalk is Amazon’s answer to the easy management of container-based applications. EB trades functionality like service discovery, cross-node communication, and advanced scheduling for simplicity and ease-of-use. One often overlooked convenience provided by EB is its support for environment variables. Instead of breaking 12-factor app rules by encouraging the storage of environment variables in the repository (dev.yaml, staging.yaml, etc.) or creating workflow problems with a env.yaml per branch, EB does something better: an easily configurable key-value store for each environment you create.
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This is Part 4 of Elastic Beanstalk vs. ECS vs. Kubernetes, see Part 1 Conclusion If you’d read up until this point, it’s probably no surprise what I’m going to write here. Kubernetes is an open source project that can run on Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Mesos, Azure, SoftLayer, CenturyLink Cloud, your local machine (minikube), CoreOS, and bare metal. It’s design is based on concepts from running containers at Google for 15 years.
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This is Part 3 of Elastic Beanstalk vs. ECS vs. Kubernetes, see Part 1 Kubernetes As a Google sponsored system, running Kubernetes on anything but Google Container Engine always seemed somewhat like a mismatch to me. AWS seemed to have too many nuances with how their load balancers, VPCs, and security groups worked when compared to Google Container Engine, that running Kubernetes on top of a different IaaS would be risky and error-prone.
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This is Part 2 of Elastic Beanstalk vs. ECS vs. Kubernetes, see Part 1 ECS (Elastic Container Service) ECS is Amazon’s answer to container orchestration. It’s a bit rough around the edges and definitely a leap from Elastic Beanstalk, but it does have the advantage of significantly more flexibility including the ability to even define a custom scheduler. All of the limitations imposed by Elastic Beanstalk are lifted. But, so is the simplified interface and the ease of deploying applications onto the cluster.
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This isn’t going to be a super-technical review of these 3 platforms, but more of a high-level overview of what to expect when engaging with each. If you’re coming here with little knowledge of containerization or running container-based workloads, here’s a short gist. Tools like Docker and rkt provide a way to run programs in containers, isolated from the rest of a system leveraging Linux control groups. Running applications this way leads to better composability, organization, and helps build immutable infrastructure that’s more robust and easier to manage.
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