AWS Elastic Beanstalk Launched

Myself and everyone on my team has been working really hard for the last year (and especially for the last few months) and we are ecstatic to finally be launching the service. 

What Is It?

For the technically inclined, Jeff Barr's blog posts really do a great job of explaining what our service is and how to use it. For the rest of you, here's the elevator pitch:

Amazon Web Services has been great if you're a developer. You can use S3 to store all of your files, EC2 to run your servers, and ELB to handle with scale. All of this without the need for buying and configuring hardware; just tell us what you want to use and it works. 

But historically, each of these services have been independent. If you build a webapp on your local machine, you have to then use each of the AWS services manually to upload your content, deploy on the Amazon servers, and then configure the load balancers to prepare your website for scale. While still easier and cheaper than buying and configuring hardware, but was a lot of work that wasn't really about developers building the best webapp they can.

It Just Works

For Java webapp developers, your life just became a lot easier. All you need to do is package your webapp as a WAR file, upload it to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and kick back. We'll handle putting files in place. We'll push it out to servers. We'll monitor load and respond accordingly so that if you become wildly successful your app will scale seamlessly. 

We get out of your way and let you spend your time developing your application. With a few clicks and a few minutes, your app can be deployed and updated on the Amazon infrastructure. You can do it from with within your Java editor if you use Eclipse. You can do it with just a web browser using the AWS Management Console (which is what I worked on). And if you prefer that computers do the work for you, you can build a tool that works directly against the AWS Elastic Beanstalk API to do the deployments on your behalf. 

Cheaper than Cheap

Additionally, this service is provided at absolutely no cost. You only have to pay for whatever resources you consume, not to use the AWS Elastic Beanstalk service itself. It gets even better: If you're a new user to AWS, you can even use a limited number of AWS resources at absolutely no cost! Just sign up for the Free Tier and launch away. 

If you've been thinking about trying Amazon Web Services to host your website, now is the time to try it out. Super easy to use and very low cost (possibly free). So get out there, deploy your app, and let us know what your experiences are. 

Happy developing.