AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Teploy: Modernizing Deployment
Elastic Beanstalk is legacy tech. It's complex, slow, and hard to debug. Teploy offers a modern, faster, and cheaper alternative for Docker deployments.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk was one of the first PaaS offerings. It promised to abstract away EC2 complexity. In reality, it leaks abstraction everywhere. If you've ever stared at a "Grey" health status or dug through CloudFormation rollback errors, you know the pain.
The Complexity Problem
Elastic Beanstalk relies on:
- EC2 Auto Scaling Groups
- ELB (Load Balancers)
- CloudWatch
- CloudFormation stacks
- S3 buckets for artifacts
Deploying a simple "Hello World" app creates ~10 different AWS resources. This incurs minimum costs (Load Balancers aren't free) and complexity costs (debugging IAM roles).
The Teploy Way
Teploy simplifies this.
- One Server: Your app runs on a VPS.
- One Load Balancer: Traefik runs on that VPS (managing SSL/routing instantly).
- One Artifact: A docker image built right there.
Speed
- Beanstalk Deployment: 5-15 minutes. (Provisioning EC2, draining connections, CloudFormation updates).
- Teploy Deployment: 30 seconds - 2 minutes. (Docker build -> Docker up).
Cost
AWS Setup
- t3.medium: ~$30/mo
- Application Load Balancer: ~$16/mo
- NAT Gateway (if private VPC): ~$32/mo
- Minimum: ~$80/mo for a structured production env.
Teploy Setup
- High Performance 4GB VPS: ~$20/mo
- Load Balancer: Included (Traefik)
- Total: $20/mo.
Vendor Lock-in
Elastic Beanstalk is proprietary to AWS.
Teploy uses standard Docker Compose files. If you decide to leave Teploy, you simply take your docker-compose.yml and run docker compose up anywhere. Zero lock-in.
Summary
Elastic Beanstalk is "Enterprise Legacy". It works, but it feels like technology from 2012. Teploy brings the modern 2026 developer experience—fast, atomic, container-native—without the AWS management overhead.