AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Cloud Giant

It has been years since Amazon began innovating in the hosting market with their cloud hosting, but I can still remember the day I spun up an EC2 instance and cried "WHAT?" over my coffee, staring at a Linux machine that cost me US$ 0.10. (By the time I had stopped staring and fiddling around, it probably cost me much more.) Nor can I forget the hours configuring machines to do fairly simple things. All along I wished for a tool just to spin up a server and all the stuff that goes with it and just make it work.

Well, for some time there has been: Elastic Beanstalk [1]. This tool isn't new, but if you're wandering around the cloud hosting landscape, I find this a much better starting point than the usual configure-your-cloud-from-scratch approaches.

Elastic Beanstalk is similar in its approach to Heroku, which is now just one of many platforms on which you git push your project, then a back-end system – Heroku, Elastic Beanstalk, etc. – deals with getting that project onto a server and behind a URL for you.

The big difference between Beanstalk and many of the other platforms is that, with AWS, the underlying architecture is exposed, so you can dig into it. If your app is successful, or just becomes more complex than the platform can manage, you can take the Beanstalk configuration of servers, load balancers, and the like and extend it.

But, you're not there yet. First, you'll want to play with Elastic Beanstalk.

Launching

To launch an application, you start by selecting the platform – Tomcat, IIS, Node, PHP, Python, Ruby – or you can customize the platform yourself, which makes it a nice fit if you're building the platform for, say, massive online coding schools, and you just want people to be able to spin up the right environment, or any situation in which you want people to be able to

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