AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs. Google App Engine

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the platform-as-a-service offering provided by Amazon and designed to leverage AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
$0
Users pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2, S3 buckets, etc.) used to store and run the application.
Google App Engine
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Google App Engine is Google Cloud's platform-as-a-service offering. It features pay-per-use pricing and support for a broad array of programming languages.
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Pricing
AWS Elastic BeanstalkGoogle App Engine
Editions & Modules
No Charge
$0
Users pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2, S3 buckets, etc.) used to store and run the application.
Starting Price
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Max Price
$0.30
Per Hour Per Instance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS Elastic BeanstalkGoogle App Engine
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AWS Elastic BeanstalkGoogle App Engine
Features
AWS Elastic BeanstalkGoogle App Engine
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
8.0
Ratings
0% above category average
Google App Engine
8.7
Ratings
9% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces8.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Scalability7.20 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Platform management overhead8.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability7.20 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Platform access control8.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration8.10 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Development environment creation7.20 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Development environment replication8.10 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification8.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Issue recovery9.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes8.10 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AWS Elastic BeanstalkGoogle App Engine
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AWS Elastic BeanstalkGoogle App Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
7.2
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.9
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AWS Elastic BeanstalkGoogle App Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is well suited for [the] rapid development of applications that use standard compute platforms based on popular programming languages. So getting a Go, Python, Ruby, or Node.js app going in AWS Elastic Beanstalk will be easy. For non-standard applications, containers provide another option for using AWS Elastic Beanstalk. In either case, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is well suited for applications that are [self-contained]. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is also good for development or test environments that need a built-in deployment method. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is less appropriate for complex applications that rely on multiple AWS services. While deploying and running the base code might be easy to get going, it may be difficult to apply permissions and integrations with the other services.
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Google App Engine is especially well suited for situations where there is a variable workload during the day, e.g. inbound task processing with task queues. In this situation queues can be setup with parameters governing the process speed/scaling which allows you to easily balance performance with cost and meet a good balance.
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Pros
  • Extremely easy to get set up and get apps deployed.
  • Integrates really well with existing build processes and is manageable through a suite of CLI tools.
  • It is very easy to scale up.
  • The documentation is exceptionally detailed and covers a very wide range of deployment scenarios.
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  • Building an application that uses Google's Authentication, means users no longer need to remember an different user id and password. Once they are logged into to Google, they can seamlessly access your application hosted on Google App Engine.
  • Google App Engine automatically scales up and down. SO if your application receives a spike in user traffic, App Engine automatically launches additional instances of your application to cater for the increased traffic. Once App Engine detects that the spike is usage is over, it automatically scales down to handle the current traffic.
  • Google App Engine can be easily integrated with Google Cloud SQL, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage etc, so that you can build out a full application using one or more of Google's Cloud Platform products.
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Cons
  • How to more easily integrate with other other AWS services. There are plenty out there, but it's not quite as seamless as I feel like it should be to mix and match products.
  • Make backing up easier when scaling the server. It took quite a bit of time to make sure we had everything set up in case something went wrong.
  • When you are first starting to use AWS, the dashboard can be very intimidating. There are countless products all with names that aren't very indicative of what they actually do.
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  • For beginners, there is a learning curve that can be reduced by decluttering the functionalities.
  • For much big migrations it takes to a lot of time to deploy which can be reduced.
  • The scaling of applications based on the user count is not seamless and it requires improvement.
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Likelihood to Renew
As our technology grows, it makes more sense to individually provision each server rather than have it done via beanstalk. There are several reasons to do so, which I cannot explain without further diving into the architecture itself, but I can tell you this. With automation, you also loose the flexibility to morph the system for your specific needs. So if you expect that in future you need more customization to your deployment process, then there is a good chance that you might try to do things individually rather than use an automation like beanstalk.
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App Engine is a solid choice for deployments to Google Cloud Platform that do not want to move entirely to a Kubernetes-based container architecture using a different Google product. For rapid prototyping of new applications and fairly straightforward web application deployments, we'll continue to leverage the capabilities that App Engine affords us.
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Usability
The overall usability is good enough, as far as the scaling, interactive UI and logging system is concerned, could do a lot better when it comes to the efficiency, in case of complicated node logics and complicated node architectures. It can have better software compatibility and can try to support collaboration with more softwares
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Google App Engine is very intuitive. It has the common programming language most would use. Google is a dependable name and I have not had issues with their servers being down....ever. You can safely use their service and store your data on their servers without worrying about downtime or loss of data.
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Support Rating
As I described earlier it has been really cost effective and really easy for fellow developers who don't want to waste weeks and weeks into learning and manually deploying stuff which basically takes month to create and go live with the Minimal viable product (MVP). With AWS Beanstalk within a week a developer can go live with the Minimal viable product easily.
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Good amount of documentation available for Google App Engine and in general there is large developer community around Google App Engine and other products it interacts with. Lastly, Google support is great in general. No issues so far with them.
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Implementation Rating
- Do as many experiments as you can before you commit on using beanstalk or other AWS features. - Keep future state in mind. Think through what comes next, and if that is technically possible to do so. - Always factor in cost in terms of scaling. - We learned a valuable lesson when we wanted to go multi-region, because then we realized many things needs to change in code. So if you plan on using this a lot, factor multiple regions.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
There are many services like AWS Elastic beanstalk, but there are none with the maturity in the platform or the cost-effectiveness of AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Also, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the oldest among them, so there are more people with AWS experience than the other platforms. The only thing is their documentation and UX are a bit old, which doesn't stop it from performing greatly, but yes, if you are looking for better UX, then you can check out other options.
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App Engine is a much more streamlined system than EC2. There is a fundamental difference between them, but they are used for basically the same thing as far a I could tell -- to serve applications EC2 is certainly more complicated, but if offers more machine-level control if that's what you need. It can tend to cost more as well. App Engine is far more straightforward but there are limitations if you need to change the environment. But even then, Google Compute Engine also compares to EC2 and stays within GCP.
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Return on Investment
  • Elastic Beanstalk removes countless hours from development team responsibility, freeing up those resources to instead focus on building the products that our customers want to use.
  • As a business that is already embedded into using EC2 instances, it's essentially free to leverage the work that AWS performs on configuring the Elastic Beanstalk stacks.
  • With Elastic Beanstalk, while there is still a responsibility to ensure that applications can work with updated underlying dependencies, it's much easier when AWS handled the heavy lifting of updating the stacks.
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  • App Engine can scale basically infinitely so our users can always expect fast responsiveness.
  • App Engine has saved us money by only using the resources we need when we need them.
  • The security and IAM policies surrounding App Engine have saved a lot of head aches.
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