AWS Elastic Beanstalk Support for PHP, with Git-based Deployment | Hacker News Reader

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Support for PHP, with Git-based Deployment

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62 pointsjeffbarr11 comments

If someone could clarify this, I'm big user of everything AWS except for Beanstalk.

This seems like a pretty big deal, even if it isn't as sophisticated as some of you believe.

Previous Beanstalk was pretty useless for me since my application is PHP and I couldn't get any value from it, but am I to believe now that I can use Beanstalk to push all changes to all of my EC2 instances, and perhaps restart my webserver and clear APC caches plus do X Y Z that is usually neccessary when I launch a new version.

I've been in the process of writing a Apache ANT script for this since the processes I go through also require me uploading the contents of my `/public/static/releases/<release-version>` to cloudfront, and then updating my applications config.ini to use the new static resources instead in replacement.

Close, except that Beanstalk handles your instances for you. It's a similar concept to Heroku.

So, is AWS starting to carve into Heroku, EngineYard, or PHPFog's territory then? Yes, I understand they offer completely managed dynos so I can sleep well and all that, but easy Git deployment is one of the major reasons why I use Heroku.

This is of course not as sophisticated as exiting PaaS solutions but together with SWF, Cloud Formation, etc. Amazon keeps delivering all the pieces necessary to build one. This greatly benefits customers (and further ties them to the platform) but it should make uneasy any PaaS vendor building on top of it. The claim from Vogels that they have no desire to go in the PaaS business rings more hollow now :

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/cloud/2012/01/26/amazon-cuts-off...

Huh. Installing a git extension is a neat idea. I wonder how it compares in usability with the custom client approach ("dotcloud push") and the vanilla git approach ("git push heroku master").

Feedback anyone?

"git aws.push"

Correction: it doesn't install a git extension, it just runs a shell script containing these 2 lines:

    git config alias.aws.elasticbeanstalk.push '!git push -f `git aws.elasticbeanstalk.remote` HEAD:refs/heads/master'
    git config alias.aws.push '!git aws.elasticbeanstalk.push $@'

Not as impressive but still kind of cool.

So, here's how to do the same thing on dotCloud:

    git config alias.dotcloud.push '!dotcloud push'

And voila:

    git dotcloud.push MYAPP

It would be interesting to see a cost comparison of AWS Beanstalk PHP compared with running the same setup on a managed LAMP VPS with average specs (e.g. 2GB RAM, 100GB storage, and 1TB monthly transfer). I've seen these types of VPS setups priced around $100 or less per month.

A VPS is just a single box, while AWS is designed for scalability (they launch a load balancer for you and everything). It's basically the same as manually configuring EC2, EBS, ELB and AutoScaling to work together, except that the deployment is automatic and you can use Git. It does cost quite a bit more though. It might make sense for a company that needs to scale, but I think I'm going to stick with my VPS provider for my own sites.

This looks exactly like Orchestra.io, which was bought by Engine Yard last year:

http://www.engineyard.com/products/orchestra

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