Mark Kirby - mobile, cloud, voice and IoT

Ruby hosting in the cloud – Elastic Beanstalk vs Heroku vs EngineYard

Three platforms stand out for cloud based hosting - Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku and EngineYard. Here I present my experiences with the three, and thoughts on which might be best to use under various factors.

To cut to the chase - Elastic Beanstalk wins, but as usual it depends on your situation.

Common features

All the below services feature:

  • Deploy from the command line with git
  • Full support for Ruby/Rails apps
  • Gems installed and updated automatically on each push
  • Comprehensive settings to handle db:migrate
  • Integrated database support (no need to set up separate instance)

Note that none of these features came with Elastic Beanstalk when it first launched - its come a long way, so may be worth reconsidering if you’d previously disregarded it.

Heroku

Pros

  • Heroku very easy to get started, you just install the toolkit and your away
  • Documentation is simple and straightforward
  • Heroku is the cheapest option for a low traffic site - you can run a site with a basic (less than 10k rows) database for free, although it will be quite slow if you have a lot of traffic
  • You don’t have to add a credit card, so you will go up in price only as and when you choose to - no nasty shocks
  • Backups are handled automatically
  • A number of addons are provided, making it easier to integrate with systems such as NewRelic for monitoring and SendGrid for emails
  • Database integration is simple with Postgres support out of the box

Cons

  • Once you need to add power and handle more traffic the price goes up quickly
  • You need to manually scale your application by adding dynos - a vague and somewhat confusing concept Heroku have come up with themselves - this gives you *some* control over price, but ultimately means your site won’t cope well with unexpected spikes in traffic
  • Customer support is reported to be poor, but I haven’t needed to use it personally
  • Heroku is owned by Sales Force, which means it could be sold at any point or deprioritised
  • Unlike the others, you can’t log into your server via SSH
  • After deploying an update the first hit to the server takes ages

We use Heroku for all our test applications, and for little pet projects that might grow. I wouldn’t use it for actual scaling though, its too expensive and you don’t get enough for your money.

EngineYard

Pros

  • Scaling happens automatically, so you can handle that spike (although this can lead to a suprisingly large bill)
  • You can **SSH **into the server and change things
  • Backups are handled automatically
  • A number of addons are provided, making it easier to integrate with systems such as NewRelic for monitoring and SendGrid for emails
  • Database integration is simple with Postgres and MySQL support out of the box
  • Support is excellent - I’ve had much first hand experience of this

Cons

  • Its a little more work to deploy than heroku, but not much, and after the first live publish it takes no longer to update
  • Its incredibly expensive, we once spent $100 on a month for a server without any traffic
  • EngineYard applies a 20% surcharge on all of Amazons prices, as it uses Amazon for storage, IP Addresses and backup, so it will almost always be more expensive

I would recommend EngineYard for production products where money is no issue, and support and absolute minimal interaction with setting up addons is required.

Elastic Beanstalk

Pros

  • New users can use Elastic Beanstalk free and underlying services up to a certain amount free for a year, making it competitive with Heroku, certainly for the first year
  • A sample low traffic site on Elastic Beanstalk after the free period is $35 per month. To run that same site on EngineYard would cost at least $86
  • Scaling happens automatically, so you can handle that spike (although this can lead to a suprisingly large bill)
  • You can **SSH **into the server and change things
  • Backups are handled automatically

Cons

  • Its a little more work to set up and deploy for the first time than Heroku and even EngineYard (the toolkit needs installing manually, you can’t do it as a gem), but it only takes a few mins extra
  • In order to use a database to get the same ease you would with Heroku and EngineYard you need to use Amazons RDS service (which provides a MySQL, Oracle or SQL Server database) which comes with variable additional charges
  • Addons aren’t provided, so its a tiny tiny bit more complex to integrate with essential monitoring tool New Relic (although it is free for AWS users), and SendGrid. Its not much more work though.
  • Its hard to work out how much you will pay, although it should always be cheaper than EngineYard since they use AWS and add on top. Elastic Beanstalk itself is free, but you pay for bandwidth, storage, database, backups etc.
  • You don’t get as much feedback from the server when pushing as you do for Heroku and EngineYard

Elastic Beanstalk is where I would recommend hosting production products to get a balance of service and price. You could even start a pet project on there right away due to the free storage tier. There are more cons, but I feel these are offset by the price for many situations.

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