I am studying for my AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification and I am confused with the difference between AWS Lambda & AWS Elastic Beanstalk. From my understanding, for both services you upload your code to AWS and AWS essentially manages the underlying infrastructure for you.
I know with Lambda you upload your code to a 'Lambda Function' and set triggers for when the code executes.
With AWS EB you upload your application code and EB automatically handles the deployment, capacity, provisioning, etc...
They both sound very similar as you upload your code to both and both handle underlying instances/environments.
Thanks!
Elastic beanstalk and lambda are very different though some of the features may look similar. At high level, elastic beanstalk deploys a long running application whereas lambda deploys short running code function
Lambda can at maximum run for 15 minutes, whereas EB can run continuously. Generally, we deploy websites/apps on EB whereas lambda are generally used for triggered functionality like processing image when image gets uploaded to S3.
Lambda can only handle one request at a time whereas number of concurrent requests EB can handle depends on your underlying infrastructure. So, if you are having say 100 requests, 100 lambdas will be created whereas these 100 requests can be handled by one underlying EC2 instance in EB
Lambda is serverless (underlying infra is entirely abstracted from developer). Whereas EB is automation over infra provisioning. You can still see your EC2 instances, load balancer, auto scaling group etc. in your AWS console. You can even ssh/rdp to your instance and change running services. AWS EB allows you also to have your custom AMIs.
Lambda is having issue of cold starts as in lambda, infra needs to be provisioned on demand by AWS, whereas in EB, you generally have EC2 instances already provisioned to handle your requests.