Amazon Releases Elastic Beanstalk!... What? | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Releases Elastic Beanstalk!... What?

37 pointszachster20 comments

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

Google turns up elasticbeanstalk.com which redirects to AWS.

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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I'm so impatient!

From: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/gs...

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

Nice, so this is one step closer to Heroku/GAE.

I hope this puts the pricing pressure on cloud services.

Another mediocre, proprietary platform to get locked into?

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...

So scala, clojure, jruby, mirah ... are all ok.

Or even quercus if you are into php.

This sounds fun!

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

That includes both lift and clojure. Not too bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

AWS blog entry (Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk):

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-elastic-beans...

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.

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

the beanstalk programming model: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/aws-beanstalk-programming...

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.

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.

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

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 :)

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

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.

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