What Is AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Why Do I Need It?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) comprises about 25 services, each of which exposes an area of functionality. While the variety of services offers flexibility for how you want to manage your AWS infrastructure, it can be challenging to figure out which services to use and how to provision them.

With AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you can quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud without worrying about the infrastructure that runs those applications. AWS Elastic Beanstalk reduces management complexity without restricting choice or control. You simply upload your application, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring. AWS Elastic Beanstalk uses highly reliable and scalable services that are available in the AWS Free Usage Tier such as:

To learn more about the AWS Free Usage Tier, and how to deploy a sample web application in it using AWS Elastic Beanstalk, go to Deploy a Sample Web Application in the Free Usage Tier.

You can also perform most deployment tasks, such as changing the size of your fleet of Amazon EC2 instances or monitoring your application, directly from the AWS Elastic Beanstalk web interface.

To use AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you create an application, upload an application version (for example, a Java .war file) to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and then provide some information about the application. Elastic Beanstalk automatically launches an environment and creates and configures the AWS resources needed to run your code. After your environment is launched, you can then manage your environment and deploy new application versions. The following diagram illustrates the workflow of AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

After you create and deploy your application, information about the application—including metrics, events, and environment status—is available through the AWS Management Console, APIs, and CLI. For step-by-step instructions on how to create, deploy, and manage your application using the AWS Management Console, go to Getting Started Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk. To learn more about an AWS Elastic Beanstalk application and its components, see AWS Elastic Beanstalk Components.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides developers and systems administrators an easy, fast way to deploy and manage your application without having to worry about AWS infrastructure. If you already know the AWS resources you want to use and how they work, you might prefer AWS CloudFormation to create your AWS resources by creating a template. You can then use this template to launch new AWS resources in the exact same way without having to recustomize your AWS resources. Once your resources are deployed, you can modify and update the AWS resources in a controlled and predictable way, providing the same sort of version control over your AWS infrastructure that you exercise over your software. For more information about AWS CloudFormation, go to AWS CloudFormation Getting Started Guide.