Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs. Oracle WebLogic Server

[Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling] is simple to set up and pretty self-explanatory. Never had issues around scaling up or down. [Now] we won't need to guess the capacity for our apps or services. The both scaling, up and down is simply perfect, you can actually stop checking every time for resources because this tool takes care of everything

Incentivized

I see Oracle WebLogic Application Server being appropriate when an application needs several different data sources and messaging providers configured and accessible, with a configured level of control of resources (connection pools) and timeouts. It is also advisable to create distributed resources that you can configure as always active to provide more processing power, or as failover for situations of availability in case of disaster recovery, for example. An application where the number of required resources configured is very small and almost non-changeable, and no scalability is required, some other options exist in the market with less cost.

Incentivized

• Dynamic scaling can be configured to respond to a wide variety of metrics and alerts
• Predictive scaling allows one to get ahead of high traffic events rather than simply reacting to them
• Health checks are configurable based on the needs of your application and architecture

Incentivized

• I love that the weblogic dashboard allows you to manage applications and see the status of each application.
• Oracle WebLogic Application Server simplifies usage periods in the development and production of business applications.
• Oracle WebLogic Server allows me to define various aspects of data source entry, including creating a specific multiple connection to facilitate data entry.
• Performance and administration are highlighted in weblogic.

Incentivized

• Sometimes, Auto scaling takes time to spin up your instances if your traffic is so high in short span of time.
• And, Auto scaling can be more efficient if we have only Load balancer in our architecture.
• It has some limitations on setting up the Auto scaling infra.

Incentivized

• The Admin UI should be further simplified, the UI design was not too user-friendly— too many options and clicks required, difficult for the new beginners to figure out what they are looking for.
• The admin server becomes the single failure point, although Oracle suggested some workarounds by setting VIP and VHost, it was not quite easy and straight forward.
• Domain replication is hard, requiring a lot of knowledge and scripts efforts.
• Admin will hang if the node manager communication encounters some issues for one or some nodes in the domain/cluster.
• Not able to kill/terminate the stuck thread, the only way is to restart the managed server (JVM)
• License cost is too high, for small businesses.

Incentivized

Usability is good since we already know how AWS works. For those that are new it might be a little bit confusing at the beginning but they are improving it at a fast pace. Even though AWS keeps changing the user interface constantly, it is still powerful, understandable and easy to use. For technical people, they still offer the CLI.

Incentivized

Oracle WebLogic Server has so many features that sometimes it's hard to find the right place to setup things, I think the dated user interface does not help with that either. This has a direct impact when deciding to use it as your application server, you'd need to have the right people and invest the time needed to master it. If you're application justifies it then it will definitely be a great choice in the long run.

Incentivized

Oracle WebLogic Application Server is great at security, performance and features.

Incentivized

The platform works as is. The help and tutorials on the help page can help you to setup the entire platform without problems, and also provides help on a huge variety of problems. Amazon also provides support plans. We have the basic support plan, but Amazon offers three support tiers, and we know that it works perfect.

Incentivized

The Oracle support is not great sometimes. They take a long time and need a lot of data over and over to resolve issues.

Incentivized

The operating system, CPU, RAM, and storage may be constructed in any configuration and readily altered after the build. The most important factor is the "sense of security."Problems may arise once every several years, but there is a significant difference when discussing how to cope with hardware problems in the local age.

I wasn't involved in selecting the server we were using but in our team we've made some efforts to improve the local deployment process by trying some other Applicational servers too. Apache Tomcat was a more lightweight solution for sure, and it coped well with our applications needs, configuration and performance wise. Despite that, since we didn't got clearance to change that into our local servers, we kept using Weblogic to guarantee compliance between the testing environments and production.

Incentivized

• We will devote more time to development than server administration, but we will require additional time if you migrate from another ecosystem.
• Fault detection and reporting are automated in the old server, and bandwidth is fixed per month, but everything is manageable automatically. We only pay for the resources we use.
• After some months, we met our return on investment (ROI).

• It made it easy to handle over a 100 of deployments across multiple nodes every quarter.
• It was easy to scale up our application to 36 nodes as the volume of transactions increased over the years.
• Helped us achieve 99.999 availability for our users.

Incentivized