*Easy to begin and impossible to outgrow, Elastic Beanstalk enables developers to deploy applications to AWS in minutes without giving up the ability to take back control of the underlying resources*
SEATTLE, Jan 19, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company, today announced 
AWS Elastic Beanstalk, an even easier way for developers to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. Developers simply upload their application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. At the same time, with Elastic Beanstalk, developers retain full control over the AWS resources powering their application and can access the underlying resources at any time. There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk – customers pay only for the AWS resources needed to run their applications. The first release of Elastic Beanstalk is built for Java developers using the familiar Apache Tomcat software stack, which ensures easy portability if developers ever want to move their applications. To learn more and to get started using Elastic Beanstalk, visit https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk.
“Elastic Beanstalk is easy to begin and impossible to outgrow,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Amazon Web Services. “It automatically scales up or down as needed and developers don’t need to worry about the configuration required to set up their infrastructure on AWS.”
Elastic Beanstalk leverages AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto-Scaling to deliver the same highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure that hundreds of thousands of businesses depend on today. However, now developers don’t need familiarity with AWS services to begin running their applications on the AWS technology infrastructure platform. To get started, developers simply upload their application to Elastic Beanstalk using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, or the Elastic Beanstalk command line tools or API. Behind the scenes, Elastic Beanstalk handles the provisioning and deployment of the infrastructure needed to run the application. Within a few minutes, the application can be accessed at a customized URL. Once the application is deployed, Elastic Beanstalk will automatically monitor application health and Amazon EC2 instance performance.
Most existing application containers or platform-as-a-service solutions, while reducing the amount of programming required, significantly diminish developers’ flexibility and control. Developers are forced to live with all the decisions pre-determined by the vendor – with little to no opportunity to take back control over various parts of their application’s infrastructure. However, with Elastic Beanstalk, developers retain full control over the AWS resources powering their application, and can perform a variety of functions by simply adjusting default configuration settings from the Elastic Beanstalk management console, including:
- Selecting the most appropriate Amazon EC2 instance type that matches the CPU and memory requirements of their application
- Choosing from several available database and storage options.
- Enabling login access to Amazon EC2 instances for immediate and direct troubleshooting
- Quickly improving application reliability by running in more than one Availability Zone
- Accessing built-in CloudWatch monitoring and getting notifications on application health and other important events
- Running other application components, such as a memory caching service, side-by-side in Amazon EC2
“We’d been grappling with how to simplify application deployment and management on AWS without removing the flexibility and control our customers have come to expect,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Amazon Web Services. “Once we started exploring the mental model of customers being able to ‘open the hood’ to tinker with the infrastructure management themselves, a light bulb went off and we realized we didn’t have to make this ‘either/or’ decision. AWS customers can now choose to have as much automation or as much control as they wish.”
While the initial release of Elastic Beanstalk supports Java web application developers, Elastic Beanstalk is designed so that it can be extended to support multiple development stacks and programming languages in the future. AWS is actively working with solution providers on the APIs and capabilities needed to create additional Elastic Beanstalk offerings.
“Customers want to be able to move their JBoss workloads easily to AWS due to its proven reliability and scalability, so we were pleased to hear about the launch of AWS Elastic Beanstalk and the potential it represents,” said Craig Muzilla, Vice President and General Manager, Middleware Business Unit at Red Hat. “Elastic Beanstalk offers an on-ramp to the cloud that enhances flexibility for developers.”
“We are excited about the plans for AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Acquia has a long history of providing enterprise class Drupal implementations on AWS, leveraging its proven reliability and scalability. Elastic Beanstalk will enable Acquia to further simplify its Acquia Managed Drupal platform as a service offering, enabling our users to upload code and files without worrying about specific hardware configurations,” said Jim Salem, Vice President of Platform Services at Acquia.
“We’re excited about the introduction of AWS Elastic Beanstalk and the benefits it can offer to Ruby on Rails developers,” said John Dillon, CEO of Engine Yard. “We’re working with AWS to provide an Elastic Beanstalk Ruby on Rails container that leverages the optimized Engine Yard stack which has been battle-tested by thousands of high-growth companies.”
With AWS Elastic Beanstalk and the AWS Free Usage Tier, getting started on AWS is even easier and can be cost free.
*Source: Amazon.com