

Amazon Releases Elastic Beanstalk!... What? - zachster

I was using my AWS console a few minutes ago and a new tab popped up featuring the odd title "Elastic Beanstalk". I tried to sign up for the service and access the documentation, but got nowhere. 
http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/7673/elastic.jpg<p>Google turns up elasticbeanstalk.com which redirects to AWS.<p>Ideas? Is it an ever expanding farm of Minecraft servers? Or maybe unlimited storage for hosting for leaked Scientology documents? Or is it just the public page for their long rumored agro-business venture?
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zachster
I'm so impatient!

From:
[http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/gs...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/gsg/)

AWS Elastic Beanstalk enables developers to quickly deploy and manage
applications in the AWS cloud without having to worry about the infrastructure
that runs those applications. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is designed to reduce
management complexity without restricting choice or control. You simply upload
your application and AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the
deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and
application health monitoring. AWS Elastic Beanstalk uses highly reliable and
scalable services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification
Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling to deploy your application
within minutes. You can also perform most deployment tasks such as changing
the fleet size or monitoring your application directly from the AWS Elastic
Beanstalk web interface

~~~
bartman
Applications must be written in Java (or anything you can put into a .war and
make Tomcat run) [1]

[1]
[http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/gs...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/gsg/Redeploy.html)

~~~
regularfry
...which would cover jruby apps packaged with warbler, unless there's
something I'm missing.

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tybris
Wow, it's Amazon's response to Google App Engine. I like their increasingly
silly naming. :-)

<http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/>

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schtono
Is it only me to confuse this with beanstalkd (opensource queuing service) in
the first place?

~~~
irfn
same here. the name had me confused for a moment.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Just to assist with cross-referencing, there's another, slightly more recent
discussion of this here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104>

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piotrSikora
AWS blog entry (Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk):

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-elastic-
beans...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-elastic-
beanstalk.html)

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lindvall
Because they don't really say this until you get to the 3rd or 4th page: This
is a way that they can deploy your Java applications (packaged as a WAR) for
you.

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amock
You can find more information at <http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/>

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riffraff
the beanstalk programming model: [http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/aws-
beanstalk-programming...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/aws-beanstalk-
programming-model.html)

This is pretty cool, but for people targeting it because of no-hassle
infiniscale, it must be noted that you either use SimpleDB or good old MySQL
for storage.

So AppEngine is still winner in that area, imvho, but it's great to see
competition.

~~~
itshanney
You can specify any JDBC connection string. Thus, you can point to any type of
DB storage technology you want. The article is just highlighting the AWS DB
offerings.

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kennethh
Anyone found out anything about prices? Would be great with something that
competed with Google App engine.

~~~
axomhacker
You don't pay anything extra for Elastic Beanstalk (you pay for whatever
underlying services you use - EC2/S3/SDB/RDS/SQS/SNS etc.)

Edit: paredit :)

~~~
vegai
Is it so that EB automatically provisions new services underneath it? Isn't
that a bit of a risk?

~~~
alnayyir
Pay-by-use has always been a risk and people have been using the API + third
party libs to automatically provision resources for some time now.

Nothing new here, except that they're squeezing Heroku and GAE now.

