Amazon Web Services continues to focus on simplifying the deployment and management on its cloud, and that’s why has included Node.js on the Elastic Beanstalk.

With this expansion of Elastic Beanstalk to include Node.js, AWS allows Node.js developers to focus on writing their applications and lets Elastic Beanstalk run and scale it automatically. As of now, Elastic Beanstalk allows developers to upload an application and then it automatically handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application-health monitoring.

As both Node.js and Elastic Beanstalk are optimized for Web applications, we believe that this step taken by Amazon is really good. Especially when Node.js comes with the advantage that developers can scale their applications without having to deal with polling, timeouts, and event loops. In addition, Node.js is based on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine and includes a library of functions that work under an event-driven model.

But yes, This isn’t the first time Amazon has offered support for Node.js on its cloud. In December, Amazon announced the availability of AWS SDK for Node.js, which is accessible for download as a developer preview. With the latest expansion of Elastic Beanstalk with Node.js, this development has further given more hands to developers, and ways to create scalable applications.

Amazon has been doing continuous efforts focusing on ease of deployment and management. Just a few weeks back, it introduced OpsWorks, a cloud-based platform powered by the Chef framework to provide enterprises more integrated tools for managing the complete application life cycle.

While Elastic Beanstalk is specifically optimized for the most common Web applications and application middleware, OpsWorks can be used with anything from simple Web applications to highly complex applications. Whatever it is, both of these are going to be quite useful for the developer community.

Last year, AppFog acquired the Node.js PaaS. While AppFog already supported Node as well as Java, Ruby, PHP and a number of other popular languages and frameworks, this acquisition enabled the firm to beef up the capabilities it offers to Node devs, as well as to gain access to the Nodester’s well-established user base.