Additionally since it is still new there is very little crowd created documentation out there on StackOverflow, etc to help you out where the official documentation is lacking.

My experience with Elastic Beanstalk makes me feel like a pioneer breaking new ground on an very early beta, not the user of a robust, finished system.

There are other issues I have with the system besides the documentation, such as logging into an instance that was created by Elastic Beanstalk for my app and seeing that it has 30 security updates that need to be installed. Why Elastic Beanstalk didn't just install these when creating the instance is beyond me. Instead I'm trying to figure out how to modify the configuration to get it to fix these security problems as part of the deployment process, but having no luck. (2 hours wasted on this so far.)

Elastic Beanstalk has the potential to be incredible, but it is still very rough in my opinion.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/python

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/nodejs

I'd love to see Beanstalk be this easy, but judging from all of the AWS documentation I've read, they won't get there anytime soon.

Note: I understand Heroku is solving the problem at a different level. I'm happy to work with the building blocks AWS provides (EC2 + ELBS + RDS etc.) but it's just the nice getting started guides / overall developer friendliness that's lacking.

    * Docs are pretty bad
    * I invariably need to log onto the instance itself to 
      find deployment bugs during development (that said, 
      it's great that I can do that)
    * Using their AMIs is the easiest but you may find 
      that they don't support the combination of software 
      you need
    * If you're deploying a python app, you'll want to 
      install celery, rails resque, php gearman etc. 
      Beanstalk doesn't really have an answer for the 
      'deploy an asynchronous job server'

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