Amazon Web Services (AWS) is debuting a new platform as a service offering that it calls AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The service automatically handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling and application health monitoring, while still leaving ultimate control in the developers’ hands. “This is a key differentiation to other offerings out there — application containers or platform-as-a-service solutions — that offer developers a simpler way to move to the cloud,” noted Amazon’s Adam Selipsky. “While reducing the amount of programming needed, other options reduce the amount of programmers’ flexibility. But we are delivering a simplified solution without taking away any of the control from the developer.”
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For now, Elastic Beanstalk supports only Java applications, but the company plans to extend it to other platforms in the future. There is no charge for the service—developers pay only for the computing resources they need to run their applications.
