Public cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) has extended its Elastic Beanstalk service to users of its Asia-Pacific data centre in Singapore.
The platform as a service (PaaS) will allow developers to quickly deploy applications without worrying about the nuts and bolts of setting up servers. According to AWS, applications can be rolled out within minutes in the AWS cloud, even without experience with cloud computing.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which automatically allocates more computing resources as usage of your application grows, supports Java, .NET, Python and PHP applications. The service is powered by a Amazon’s cloud infrastructure and storage services such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).
With the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio and the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, developers can deploy applications to Elastic Beanstalk without leaving their development environment. The service also automates management tasks such as monitoring, application version deployment, a basic health check, and facilitates log file access.
So how does Elastic Beanstalk differ from existing PaaS offerings?
Amazon says while most existing application containers and PaaS solutions reduce the amount of programming required, developers are forced to live with all the decisions predetermined by the vendor — with little to no opportunity to take back control over various parts of their application’s infrastructure.
“However, with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, developers retain full control over the AWS resources powering their application. If developers decide they want to manage some (or all) of the elements of their infrastructure, they can do so seamlessly by using Elastic Beanstalk’s management capabilities.”
Elastic Beanstalk joins a growing pool of PaaS services such as Salesforce.com’s Heroku, Red Hat’s OpenShift and VMware’s Cloud Foundry available to developers in the booming cloud services market. More recently in Singapore, local telco SingTel unveiled a new PaaS service that runs on its Alatum cloud infrastructure in partnership with Progress Software.
