Questions: What does Elastic BeanStalk mean for me?
1. Can my database auto-scale?
2. Can my JVM heap auto-scale beyond 2 GB without GC pauses?
Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk
11–20 of 58 posts
Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk
#12AWS never fit into my definition of a "cloud" solution. It's a VPS with a rich API and a lot of addons (load balancer, EBS, S3...). From what I'm reading, Beanstalk changes this and clearly puts AWS in the category they've long claimed to be in. Not that their service wasn't great/unique before. This just puts them that much further ahead. It's along the lines of what Heroku does with their routing mesh layer (as far…
What's your definition of a "cloud" solution?
automatic scaling would be a good benchmark for the true definition of cloud.
a lot of "cloud" services these days are nearly identical to VPS services of yore, with the added new ability to create/destroy VPS nodes whenever you want. very few of the big "cloud" providers actually handle auto scaling (as it's difficult in a world where all apps are not made the same).
Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk
#13I'm not sure how useful this really is. It just handles the application layer, leaving you on your own for dealing with the database. Now, Amazon has some services to help you out (RDS, SimpleDB), but SimpleDB is kind of crap, and RDS is expensive. More importantly, that loses some of the simplicity, meaning that you still have to think about infrastructure to a degree. Heroku is git push to deploy, and if you have a…
RDS pricing appears competitive to Heroku's dedicated databases. It's hard to compare them directly since RDS separates instance type, on-demand and reserved instances, provisioned storage, replication (crossing availability zone boundaries), and number of requests. Heroku on the other hand provides a fixed amount of storage (and one that's twice the max one can provision for RDS), a mix of instance types, and a connection cap limit. It's not clear if Heroku provides multiple availability zone instances similar to RDS.
Ignoring provisioned storage and request costs one can have a small on-demand RDS instance for ~$80/month. Heroku's instance (RAM/CPU) equivalent (Ronin) is $200/month.
Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk
#14Just to be clear, this is only for Java apps right? This does not include PHP or Python?
At the moment that appears so.
If you wanted something similar for Python or PHP then you could use VMWares VApp stuff which gives you the PaaS solution on top of hardware hosted by Colt which gives you the IaaS solution.
The reason that the VMWare offer gives you Python, PHP or other stuff, is that under-the-hood VMWare are using Chef and you can run your own custom Recipes, hence you could deploy whatever you want as a managed platform... though you would lose the Eclipse right-click deploy (though honestly if you're deploying from CI you're probably not going to be using this anyway).
Edit: It being almost impossible to just find simple and clear documentation on the VMWare site, this is the info link I've managed to unearth: http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director/overview.html
The key point is that you could create a virtual datacenter, hosted with a 3rd party like Colt, and then use Chef to manage it as a platform, and deploy directly to it as if you owned your own "Elastic Beanstalk".
As an aside, I for one am getting tired of the never-ending list of acronyms and strange product names that are coming out from every vendor.
Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk
#15At the moment I'm able to launch applications in the US East region only. When will the other regions support Elastic Beanstalk?
Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your definition of a "cloud" solution?
automatic scaling would be a good benchmark for the true definition of cloud. a lot of "cloud" services these days are nearly identical to VPS services of yore, with the added new ability to create/destroy VPS nodes whenever you want. very few of the big "cloud" providers actually handle auto scaling (as it's difficult in a world where all apps are not made the same).
upvoted, but since I'm the OP, just wanted to say that yes, this is what I meant.
Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk
#17Would that make a good fit for an Apache Solr server? Put the index on EBS?
Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk
#18Just to be clear, this is only for Java apps right? This does not include PHP or Python?
Presumably Jython would be pretty easy to get running, and you can run eg Django on Jython: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/jython/
Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your definition of a "cloud" solution?
automatic scaling would be a good benchmark for the true definition of cloud. a lot of "cloud" services these days are nearly identical to VPS services of yore, with the added new ability to create/destroy VPS nodes whenever you want. very few of the big "cloud" providers actually handle auto scaling (as it's difficult in a world where all apps are not made the same).
automatic scaling would be a good benchmark for the true definition of cloud.
You can do this with EC2. You can set up monitors based on CPU usage over a time period and it'll start new nodes if required.
S3 is 'autoscaling' for serving files. Just upload your files and pay for what you use.
Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk
#20Wow. The benefits of Google App Engine without the limitations? Sure, an app on GAE is probably cheaper in terms of monthly expense, but factor in the development costs for a Java team unfamiliar with App Engine and Beanstalk is probably a far better investment.
no, with different limitations I believe, e.g. no cool google storage, but only SDB or RDB (which may be ok anyway)