
Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk - jluxenberg
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-elastic-beanstalk.html
======
mmelin
Wow. The benefits of Google App Engine without the limitations? Sure, an app
on GAE is probably cheaper in terms of monthly expense, but factor in the
development costs for a Java team unfamiliar with App Engine and Beanstalk is
probably a far better investment.

~~~
riffraff
no, with different limitations I believe, e.g. no cool google storage, but
only SDB or RDB (which may be ok anyway)

~~~
rbranson
I agree. It's definitely meh without a useful and truly scalable database.
That's the hard part. SimpleDB isn't particularly useful, and RDB isn't
particularly scalable.

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tybris
Don't worry, by the time you'll be so big that you scale out of RDS, you'll be
able to build your own datastore.

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hallmark
It's easy to find holes in this announcement: Beanstalk doesn't have X, or
they compare unfavorably to AppEngine and Heroku in certain areas. The bigger
news here is that Amazon has staked a flag in the ground and decidedly shown
their intention to enter the PaaS arena.

What has AWS done in the past? They've introduced a new product, then over
time:

1) Made it easier to manage 2) Made it more automated 3) Added additional bits
of functionality

Why would we not expect them to do the same with Beanstalk?

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

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118778>

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jackowayed
I'm not sure how useful this really is. It just handles the application layer,
leaving you on your own for dealing with the database. Now, Amazon has some
services to help you out (RDS, SimpleDB), but SimpleDB is kind of crap, and
RDS is expensive.

More importantly, that loses some of the simplicity, meaning that you still
have to think about infrastructure to a degree.

Heroku is git push to deploy, and if you have a standard Rails app, that's it.

Whereas to deploy a standard Rails app, after you package up your app as a
.war with JRuby (and deal with possible gem incompatibilities), you have to
spin up an RDS instance too. And change the config in your Rails app so that
it knows how to talk to the RDS instance. And if your RDS instance crashes,
they backed it up for you, but you still have to manually restore from the
backup.

And once you're already thinking about infrastructure to that degree, you've
lost a lot of the benefit of a PaaS.

~~~
jonburs
RDS pricing appears competitive to Heroku's dedicated databases. It's hard to
compare them directly since RDS separates instance type, on-demand and
reserved instances, provisioned storage, replication (crossing availability
zone boundaries), and number of requests. Heroku on the other hand provides a
fixed amount of storage (and one that's twice the max one can provision for
RDS), a mix of instance types, and a connection cap limit. It's not clear if
Heroku provides multiple availability zone instances similar to RDS.

Ignoring provisioned storage and request costs one can have a small on-demand
RDS instance for ~$80/month. Heroku's instance (RAM/CPU) equivalent (Ronin) is
$200/month.

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latch
AWS never fit into my definition of a "cloud" solution. It's a VPS with a rich
API and a lot of addons (load balancer, EBS, S3...).

From what I'm reading, Beanstalk changes this and clearly puts AWS in the
category they've long claimed to be in. Not that their service wasn't
great/unique before. This just puts them that much further ahead.

It's along the lines of what Heroku does with their routing mesh layer (as far
as I understand it).

~~~
chanri
Amazon's execution with EC2 over the past few years has been excellent. If
Amazon makes a Rails version of Beanstalk, Heroku should be worried as
Beanstalk could take some market share from Heroku.

~~~
_pdeschen
According to press release

“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.” John Dillon, CEO of
Engine Yard

[http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110119005591/en/Amaz...](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110119005591/en/Amazon-
Web-Services-Introduces-AWS-Elastic-Beanstalk)

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kumarshantanu
Questions: What does Elastic BeanStalk mean for me?

1\. Can my database auto-scale?

2\. Can my JVM heap auto-scale beyond 2 GB without GC pauses?

~~~
wmf
It's built on EC2, so no and no.

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chanri
Just to be clear, this is only for Java apps right? This does not include PHP
or Python?

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Charuru
This is just the first step, according to techcrunch ruby is next.

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/19/amazon-web-services-
introdu...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/19/amazon-web-services-introduces-
elastic-beanstalk-for-easier-app-deployment/)

~~~
technomancy
Ruby already works, actually: [http://blog.headius.com/2011/01/jruby-on-rails-
on-amazon-ela...](http://blog.headius.com/2011/01/jruby-on-rails-on-amazon-
elastic.html)

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zoomzoom
The real question is: can this offering compete with the specialized PaaS
services we have seen emerge in the last year - heroku, GAE,
djangy.djangozoom/eldairon, various node.js services, phpfog, etc...

The specialized services will be less work to maintain for developers, and
will offer unique additional features that Amazon will have a hard time
keeping up with if they try to spread themselves too thin.

~~~
bialecki
Because Iwork mainly in Python, I just checked out the offerings you mentioned
for Python that aren't GAE. Both Djangy and Djangozoom are in private beta
still, so I can't imagine they're that far along. Eldarion doesn't look self
serve, although maybe that's just their site.

It seems likely that, not only can Amazon compete, but could probably
dominate. Heroku is a big outlier and really the first to demonstrate that the
need/power of a PaaS. It doesn't look like there's anything nearly as mature
for Python. Don't know about other languages/frameworks, but if it's like
Python, Amazon has a big opportunity here.

~~~
zoomzoom
Agreed - the only one I have actually used is GAE, and I was definitely not
trying to endorse the other services as "too good to beat." Just trying to say
that with all the different stacks out there for different languages and
purposes there will be a benefit to specialization, which might not benefit
from amazon's skillset as much as the provisioning of VPS's and other
infrastructure has.

For python hosting, GAE is probably the only real competition at this point.
There is a HUGE opportunity to eliminate sysadmin work on all these stacks for
smaller developers especially. I am just not sure if Amazon will domiate both
the infrastructure and platform layer.

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jread
This is cool, but not earth shattering. It is essentially a management
stack/abstraction layer/deployment tool on top of existing AWS services: EC2,
CloudWatch, load balancing, route 53, autoscaling, AMIs. It is a PaaS sort
of... but single-tenant and not in the same sense as a multi-tenant, higher
level PaaS like AppEngine or Heroku. Elastic Beanstalk gives you flexibility
(full root access - do whatever you want), but with that comes more
responsibility from a management perspective, and more opportunities to shoot
yourself in the foot.

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ecaroth
Cool new feature. Not too tough to see this coming though. One of the biggest
barriers of entry to AWS has always been scaling/deployment. With companies
like Cloudkick and Scalr helping to alleviate this, but being somewhat
platform agnostic (Cloudkick supports aws, rackspace cloud, etc) Amazon would
want to have an all-encompasing solution that has more of a vendor-lock in to
their products. With solutions like Beanstalk and their free web tier, AWS is
becoming easier to step right into each day. I predict that in a few years
there will be no such thing as shared web hosting...

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ekiara
Sounds like a great idea, though the naming is a bit unfortunate, there might
be some confusion between the Git hosting and collaboration application:
beanstalkapp.com.

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taylorbuley
An Amazon marketer might say that's Beanstalkapp's problem now

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vladmars
There's still plenty of room for competition. Beanstalk is limited in its
ability to innovate because it is simply a management layer on top of AWS,
which will restrict its potential feature offerings.

I think smaller developers stand to reap huge productivity benefits from
easier to use and more feature-rich platforms such as Heroku.

~~~
jburwell
Why is being a "simple" management layer atop AWS limiting? Bear in mind that
Heroku is, in your terms, simply a management layer atop AWS. Using it as a
technical yardstick and considering Amazon's strong financial position and
commitment, it stands to reason that there is a long runway for Beanstalk's
innovation.

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FiReaNG3L
Would that make a good fit for an Apache Solr server? Put the index on EBS?

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jollojou
At the moment I'm able to launch applications in the US East region only. When
will the other regions support Elastic Beanstalk?

~~~
hallmark
Yes, US East region only for now. From their official FAQ, other regions in
the future:

<http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/faqs/#regions>

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piotrSikora
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118778>

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dholowiski
"beanstalk is built using a number of existing AWS services, not from magic
beans."

