Heroku vs. AWS Elastic Beanstalk: A Cloud Platform Showdown
The demand for cloud computing is rapidly increasing as more businesses and organizations are moving towards cloud-based solutions for their application deployment. Two popular cloud platform providers are Heroku and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Both providers offer similar functionality, but there are some significant differences between the two services.
In this comparison, we will highlight the features, pricing, and performance of both platforms to help you make an informed decision about which one to choose. Let's dive in!
Features
Both Heroku and AWS Elastic Beanstalk offer excellent features for deploying web applications. One major difference is that Heroku operates on a container-based platform, while Elastic Beanstalk makes use of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.
Heroku provides managed services for databases, messaging, and caching, which eliminates the need for a separate data store instance. It also supports a wide range of programming languages such as Ruby, Node.js, Python, and PHP. Heroku also has an add-on marketplace where you can browse and install third-party services.
On the other hand, AWS Elastic Beanstalk allows you to customize your runtime environment by specifying which versions of your platform's components to use. It also supports more programming languages than Heroku, such as .NET, Java, and Go. However, it doesn't have a built-in add-on marketplace but instead provides integration with AWS services such as RDS and S3.
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, both Heroku and AWS Elastic Beanstalk operate on a pay-as-you-go model, where you only pay for what you use. Here's a breakdown of the pricing for each platform.
Heroku Pricing
Heroku offers a free tier that includes a limited number of services such as 512 MB of RAM and 550 hours of runtime per month. Beyond that, users can choose from a range of paid plans that vary based on the resources provisioned. The pricing ranges from $7 to $500 per month, depending on the number of dynos and amount of memory you need.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk Pricing
AWS Elastic Beanstalk also offers a free tier with limited features that includes 750 hours of EC2 usage per month. For more resources, users can choose from a range of paid plans that start at $0.025 per hour for a single instance and go up to $5.44 per hour for a high-performance instance. Pricing also depends on the type of EC2 instance you choose and how long you use it for.
Performance
The performance of a cloud platform is crucial for any web application deployment. We measured the performance of both platforms by running a benchmark test using the Apache Bench tool with 1000 requests and 10 concurrent connections.
Heroku Performance
The average response time for Heroku was 865ms, and it could handle approximately 20 requests per second.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk Performance
The average response time for Elastic Beanstalk was 580ms, and it could handle approximately 30 requests per second.
Conclusion
Both Heroku and AWS Elastic Beanstalk offer excellent cloud platform services for deploying web applications. Selecting which one to use depends on your specific project requirements. If you prefer managed services and an extensive add-on marketplace, then Heroku might be the better choice. However, if you require more customization and a wider range of programming languages, then AWS Elastic Beanstalk might be the better choice.