

Announcing AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Node.js - subsection1h
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/03/11/announcing-aws-elastic-beanstalk-for-node-js/

======
scanr
Even though it's relatively primitive compared to some of the other PaaS
providers out there, I really like AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Here are some of the
reasons why:

    
    
        * You only pay for the underlying AWS services
        * ELB + EC2 + RDS is a good stack for a lot of 
          web applications
        * They support environments and promoting releases
          from one environment to the other (e.g. 
          qa -> production)
        * Git integration
    

There are a bunch of downsides but it's a cheap MVP for a certain category of
database driving webapp for me.

~~~
adamnemecek
What are some of the downsides?

~~~
idunno246
You have to use their base AMI. Which was really bad because for a while it
suffered from a kernel deadlock on disk write bug(this should be fixed by
now). There's very little configuration options - when I was using it you
couldn't setup logrotate for instance. It worked pretty well, for java at
least, until the server started locking up every couple hours.

When it integrates with opsworks, I'll be excited about it.

~~~
dazzla
You can now use configuration files to customize your instance. You can
install packages, download files, run shell scripts etc. Works well.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/custom...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/customize-
containers.html)

------
joeblau
I just added Elastic Beanstalk's dot directory to <http://gitignore.io>

<http://gitignore.io/api/elasticbeanstalk>

~~~
yannis
Thanks, nice application. Love the color scheme.

------
quahada
Does it support websockets? Pretty important feature for node.js.

~~~
mathrawka
You need to use TCP forwarding on the ELB, not HTTP. The disadvantages are:

* You cannot enable stickiness on the ELB

* You will not get the client IP forwarded to your instances

~~~
miles932
you do get the client IP, but it comes as a request header: x-forwarded-for
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/Devel...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/TerminologyandKeyConcepts.html#x-forwarded-
for)

~~~
lucian1900
How would that work for a protocol that isn't HTTP?

------
crindy
I'm working on a meteor application, and one of the things I'm scared of is
that no one knows how to make one run on multiple machines.

Would this solve that problem, by providing an essentially infinite sized
machine?

~~~
JoshGlazebrook
This is essentially what these PaaS services do. Appfog for example gives you
2GB of ram to deploy your app with for free. You can deploy an app to 8
separate instances with 256MB of ram, or you can adjust it differently. With
heroku you get 1 "dyno" for free, and for each additional dyno it's another
charge, etc. etc. They do all the work of load balancing and making it "just
work"

------
kumar303
Prior to this, Mozilla has been using AWSBox as a similar deploy environment
for node.js <https://github.com/mozilla/awsbox>

------
jedschmidt
Does anyone know how often they update their containers for other platforms?
The maximum node.js version on Beanstalk is 0.8.21, but the current stable is
now 0.10.0.

~~~
mminer
Their Python container, which became available last August, has yet to be
updated to support version 2.7 (released 2010) or 3.x. This may not be
indicative of how often they'll update the node.js container, but their effort
to keep up with the latest and greatest doesn't seem too aggressive.

------
apapli
How does this compare with Heroku for RoR hosting? Do they compete or is
Heroku solving a different problem?

~~~
niclupien
IMHO Heroku is way more easy to do deploy and makes it more accessible to non-
sysadmins.

    
    
        heroku create
        git push heroku master
    

With Amazon, you need to spend some time understanding how it works and what
do you want. It's also not very clear for a beginner to define what kind of
bill you will get today, in a month, in a year. I think Amazon is trying very
hard but I always end up reading tons of documents and finally not really
understand what they means in the end.

------
outside1234
what is the best node.js PaaS solution out there? This doesn't look as nice as
Azure's offering that I've been using. Who do people like the most?

~~~
JoshGlazebrook
There is appfog, heroku, nodejitsu, and a few others. Afaik, nodejitsu is the
only one with full websockets support at the moment.

~~~
shykes
dotCloud has full websockets support. Http://dotcloud.com

~~~
vicky_rockstar
And I am using it...!

------
weitzj
Even better: default VPC without extra cost

