I was using my AWS console a few minutes ago and a new tab popped up featuring the odd title "Elastic Beanstalk". I tried to sign up for the service and access the documentation, but got nowhere.
http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/7673/elastic.jpg<p>Google turns up elasticbeanstalk.com which redirects to AWS.<p>Ideas? Is it an ever expanding farm of Minecraft servers? Or maybe unlimited storage for hosting for leaked Scientology documents? Or is it just the public page for their long rumored agro-business venture?
I'm so impatient!<p>From:
<a href="http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/gsg/" rel="nofollow">http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/gs...</a><p>AWS Elastic Beanstalk enables developers to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud without having to worry about the infrastructure that runs those applications. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is designed to reduce management complexity without restricting choice or control. You simply upload your application and AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. AWS Elastic Beanstalk uses highly reliable and scalable services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling to deploy your application within minutes. You can also perform most deployment tasks such as changing the fleet size or monitoring your application directly from the AWS Elastic Beanstalk web interface
Wow, it's Amazon's response to Google App Engine. I like their increasingly silly naming. :-)<p><a href="http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/</a>
Just to assist with cross-referencing, there's another, slightly more recent discussion of this here:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104</a>
Because they don't really say this until you get to the 3rd or 4th page: This is a way that they can deploy your Java applications (packaged as a WAR) for you.
the beanstalk programming model:
<a href="http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/aws-beanstalk-programming-model.html" rel="nofollow">http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/aws-beanstalk-programming...</a><p>This is pretty cool, but for people targeting it because of no-hassle infiniscale, it must be noted that you either use SimpleDB or good old MySQL for storage.<p>So AppEngine is still winner in that area, imvho, but it's great to see competition.