What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale applications. You simply upload your code, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment (Capacity provisioning, Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Health Monitoring).
Key Concepts
- Developer Friendly: "I just want to run my code, I don't want to manage servers."
- Under the Hood: It creates normal AWS resources (EC2, ELB, ASG, RDS) for you. You generally don't pay for Beanstalk itself, only for the resources it creates.
- Control: You retain full control over the underlying resources if you need to tweak them.
Exam Tips
[!IMPORTANT] CloudFormation vs. Elastic Beanstalk:
- Beanstalk: PaaS. Easier. "Upload Code."
- CloudFormation: IaC. More powerful. "Write Templates."
[!NOTE] Platforms: Supports Docker, Go, Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby.
Common Use Cases
- Quick Deployment: Launching a Proof of Concept (PoC) web app in minutes.
- Microservices: Deploying a simple worker service without managing the OS.