Elastic Beanstalk with Docker is great at having a standard way of running and scaling out web and worker applications, if you are OK with AWS abstractions and further lock-in. For instance, auto-scaling web apps using autoscaling group policies is extremely powerful, but I believe there is a lot of accidental complexity that comes with Elastic Beanstalk so we chose something that we believe is simpler and easier to understand or change.
- AWS is great at taking an existing technology, wrapping it into AWS-specific concepts and creating a proprietary JSON/XML API around it. This is why ECS Task Definitions exist. Elastic Beanstalk goes one step further and creates yet another layer of API on top of ECS and ELB aptly called Dockerrun.aws.json v2. The format is proprietary and we preferred ex