I've been using Elastic Beanstalk for some time now and while I find it quite useful for people who just want to get Docker to production without investing to much time into Orchestration, it looks to me like there is a bit of price to pay for that 'simplicity':
- Elastic Beanstalk does not provide a native Docker experience. You're forced to use AWS own way of defining services and dependencies (Dockerrurn.aws.json, which comes in two versions). This means you cannot longer use docker-compose, and not all of the options from `docker run` are available (logging driver, privileged containers, though I think the ability to run privileged containers was recently added).
- From my personal experience deployment times can be unacceptable long ranging from 5 - 20 mins. They get longer as you add more instances to the environment or if the instances are not powerful enough.
I think Elastic Beanstalk makes a good choice for starters or for not so mission-critical applications.
As a result of the points explained above I'm now looking into more Docker-centric solutions such Rancher/Kubernete or Docker's UCP.
