Amazon Web Services launches Elastic Beanstalk, a service of services
Amazon Web Services on Wednesday launched "Elastic Beanstalk," which automates the management of various services at the cloud provider.
Image via Financial Farmer.
In a nutshell, AWS's Elastic Beanstalk handles all the deployment details when a Web developer launches an application. For instance, Elastic Beanstalk will deploy and manage services for storage, computing clusters, load balancing and auto scaling.
Adam Selipsky, vice president of Web services at Amazon, said the Elastic Beanstalk effort is targeted at both small developers as well as enterprises that don't want to put a lot of manpower behind managing cloud computing instances. "This is for customers building applications that may not have the technical depth to manage the underlying compute infrastructure," said Selipsky. "Beanstalk is completely black boxed."
On the enterprise side of the equation, Elastic Beanstalk could allow companies to choose what applications they want to put on autopilot. The hope is that AWS' latest service will entice more companies to move applications to its cloud.
Selipsky said AWS' effort with Elastic Beanstalk revolved around improving the ease of use while allowing the developer to have total control. Selipsky said increasingly platform as a service providers are presenting a trade-off between control and ease of use. "We wanted to give the developer full control so they wouldn't be locked in or have to build applications in a proprietary manner," said Selipsky.
A few key points about Elastic Beanstalk:
- The first version is focused on Java and Apache Tomcat and integrated with Eclipse tools. Selipsky said that Elastic Beanstalk was built as a framework that can be used for other programming languages in the future via Amazon or third parties. "Java was done first to create a useful starting point," said Selipsky.
- There's no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk---you're charged for the underlying services such as EC2, S3 and the like.
- Elastic Beanstalk will appear as a new tab in the AWS management console. To migrate applications to Beanstalk, you have to create a new instance then terminate the previous one.
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