Question 1

What's the difference between Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon ECS?

Accepted Answer

Elastic Beanstalk is a higher-level platform that deploys your application and automatically sets up resources like EC2, load balancing, and Auto Scaling for you. Amazon ECS is a container orchestration service where you run containers and manage task definitions, clusters, and scaling policies more directly. Use Beanstalk when you want a simpler “deploy my app” experience; use ECS when you want container-native control and portability.

Question 2

When should I use Elastic Beanstalk?

Accepted Answer

Use Elastic Beanstalk when you want to deploy a web app or API quickly with minimal infrastructure work, and you’re okay with AWS managing most of the environment setup (instances, scaling, load balancing, health checks). It’s a good fit for prototypes, small-to-medium production apps, and teams that want a managed platform but still want access to underlying AWS resources when needed.

Question 3

How much does Elastic Beanstalk cost?

Accepted Answer

Elastic Beanstalk itself has no additional charge. You pay for the AWS resources it creates and uses, such as EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon RDS (if used), Amazon S3, and CloudWatch logs/metrics. Total cost depends on instance sizes and counts, load balancer type, data transfer, storage, and how aggressively you scale.

Elastic Beanstalk

Definition

Real-World Example

Related Terms

Cloud Provider Equivalencies

Explore More Cloud Computing Terms