[laumars]

EB is for sites operating at a different, smaller, scale to the kind of sites you'd host with the AWS design being critiqued.

Personally I've found EB to be a great development tool but it's really hard to manage once you step up into the enterprise scale. By that point you'd be writing your CloudFormation scripts by hand (or better yet, using Hashicorp Terraform) and "building stuff to fail" (as the adage goes).

edit: getting downvoted. I'm guessing some people are using EB for sites that generate millions of visitors a day (let alone minute like some services I manage). I'd be interested to hear how you overcame EB's shortcomings with resource failures breaking the entire EB build pipeline in often unrecoverable ways.

[rfks]

I owned a service running on EB that did 100QPS stable, 5K QPS weekly peak (with reasonably linear traffic increases) ~5 years ago. I'd still recommend it, but we hit some arbitrary limits / found leaky abstractions that took a lot of time to work around. Overall, I'd much rather own a EB app (or any other PAAS, or Kubernetes) than a tangled nest of bash scripts, JIRA tickets and tribal knownledge.

[laumars]

Well as I alluded to in my previous comment, there are other IaC options on the table that offer better granularity for deploying cloud infrastructure (and no, I’m not talking about Bash scripts).

In fact theses days there are a lot of Infrastructure as Code solutions out there. If you deal mainly with lambdas then there’s Serverless[1] or CDK[2] (Cloud Developer Kit). EB is itself ostensibly “just” a frontend for CloudFormation[3] (as I hinted at in my earlier post). Personally I use HashiCorp Terraform[4] the most but every single one of the aforementioned bar CDK has been used in production by my team.

However if none of those float your boat then there are a whole plethora of other IaC tools out there I’ve not mentioned.

So if you’re hitting the limitations of EB then your time is well spent learning another tool. In fact I’d go further than that and say I think it is worth your while learning Terraform (or any other IaC tool) even if you aren’t hitting the limitations of EB —- but I’m biased because of having wasted so much time in the past fixing deployments that EB has completely mismanaged.

[1] https://serverless.com/

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/

[3] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/

[4] https://www.terraform.io/