Author: Priyanshu Chhazed

Developers at startups are almost always faced with the question of the most cost-effective way of getting the benefits of the cloud without managing the underlying systems. Years ago, when we were still building monoliths and using EC2 instances, Elastic Beanstalk (or Google App Engine and Azure App Service) was a tempting choice for young start-ups looking to deploy fast.

Even then, Elastic Beanstalk (EB) was a fit only for non-mission-critical applications that required standard configuration and deployments. (Here are some accounts of real developers getting their hands burnt with EB). Besides, Elastic Beanstalk has not seen a major upgrade for some time, so should you use it even for non-mission-critical applications? What are the modern alternatives to Elastic Beanstalk in 2022?

You want to set up your first automatic deployment pipeline that builds, tests, and deploys code changes to your target cloud environment. You’ve spent days reading docs and blogs to figure out what your automatic deployment pipeline should comprise. But it all seems really overwhelming. They mention various tools like AWS, Azure, GitHub Actions, Ansible, Jenkins, CircleCI, Terraform, and Kubernetes — the list is endless. And you’re not sure which one is necessary for your initial automatic deployment pipeline.

What does your first continuous delivery pipeline need to do and not do?