Introducing Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

One of the key features of a cloud is to provide its users and developers with a seamless and easy to use platform for developing and deploying their applications. That's exactly where Elastic Beanstalk comes in. Elastic Beanstalk was first launched in the year 2011, and has continuously evolved to become a full-fledged PaaS offering from AWS.

Elastic Beanstalk is your one-stop shop for quickly deploying and managing your web applications in AWS. All you need to do is upload your code to Beanstalk, and voila! Elastic Beanstalk takes care of the entire application's deployment process, from EC2 capacity provisioning to auto-scaling the instances and even load balancing using an ELB! Elastic Beanstalk does it all so that you can concentrate on more important tasks, such as developing your applications and not getting bogged down with complex operational nuances.

But for me, Beanstalk is much more than just the deployment and management of your applications. Let's look at some of the key benefits of leveraging Elastic Beanstalk for your web applications:

• Deployment support: Today, Beanstalk supports standard EC2 instances and Docker containers as the basis for your application's deployment. This enables you to host your web applications and your microservices-based apps on AWS with relative ease.
• Platform support: Beanstalk provides a rich set of platforms for developers to deploy their apps on. Today, the list includes Java, PHP, Python, .NET, Node.js, and Ruby, with more languages and platforms to be added in the future.
• Developer friendly: It is extremely easy to build and deploy your applications over to AWS using Beanstalk. You can leverage a wide variety of options, including the AWS Management Console or its CLI, a code repository such as Git, or even an IDE such as Eclipse or Visual Studio to upload your application, and the rest is all taken care of by Beanstalk itself.
• Control: With Beanstalk, you get complete control over your underlying AWS resources as well as the environments on which your application runs. You can change the instance types, scale the resources, add more application environments, configure ELBs, and much more!
• Costs: One of the best things about Beanstalk is that it's absolutely free! Yes, you heard it right! Free! You only pay for the AWS resources that are spun up based on the configurations that you provide and nothing more. Amazing isn't it?

With these pointers in mind, let's look at some of the essential concepts and terminologies that you ought to know before getting started with Elastic Beanstalk.