Zero to Production Node.js on Amazon Web Services Alternative Production Environments

Transcript from the "Alternative Production Environments" Lesson

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>> Kevin Whinnery: And as what we've always done, we talk about the alternatives. Obviously if you go with a platform as a service like Heroku. It's fully managed, your DevOps responsibilities are virtually nil. But it does cost, tends to cost a lot of money at scale. Whereas if you go to the other extreme on managing your own infrastructure, what you don't get is this orchestration software.

[00:00:28] So when you do an eb deploy, there's no management software that's going to take some of your instances out of the fleet update them, put them back in and do those changes for you. So there's lots of other open source software and Amazon tools that you can use to accomplish this.

[00:00:47] But that is essentially the value that elastic beanstalk provides is that even though it is kind of a pain in the ass to set up, once it is set up, the orchestration that you get is actually pretty strong. There's just generally if the more control you have of the infrastructure the more DevOps you're gonna have to do.

[00:01:08] I mean really what this comes down to is resources, right? Like if operating your service at scale is more expensive than the time you might spend on dev ops. Then that's the time when you're gonna wanna probably manage your own infrastructure versus if time is more precious than time is more expensive than the amount of money you would spend on server infrastructure and going to something like a pass is probably a wiser choice.

[00:01:36] And lastly, Beanstalk is kind of in the middle. It's the gateway between something like Heroku and a fully self-managed EC2 environment.