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Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk

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Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk

#3

Post by mmelin »

Wow. 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.

Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk

#4

Post by jackowayed »

I'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 standard Rails app, that's it.

Whereas to deploy a standard Rails app, after you package up your app as a .war with JRuby (and deal with possible gem incompatibilities), you have to spin up an RDS instance too. And change the config in your Rails app so that it knows how to talk to the RDS instance. And if your RDS instance crashes, they backed it up for you, but you still have to manually restore from the backup.

And once you're already thinking about infrastructure to that degree, you've lost a lot of the benefit of a PaaS.

Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk

#6

Post by latch »

AWS 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 as I understand it).

Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk

#8

Post by chanri »

latch wrote: post #6

AWS 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…

Amazon's execution with EC2 over the past few years has been excellent. If Amazon makes a Rails version of Beanstalk, Heroku should be worried as Beanstalk could take some market share from Heroku.

Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk

#9

Post by jonburs »

chanri wrote: post #5

Just to be clear, this is only for Java apps right? This does not include PHP or Python?

From what I can gather the current beta version only supports Java (i.e., war packaged) apps, but the intention is to support other kinds of application containers in the future.

Conceivably one could use jython or quercos to deploy python or php applications.

Re: Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk

#10

Post by tybris »

latch wrote: post #6

AWS 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?
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