Amazon announced it has launched AWS Elastic Beanstalk beta, Amazon Web Services’ first platform-as-a-service. Elastic Beanstalk is free for AWS customers and can be used with the AWS Free Usage Tier. Beanstalk automatically handles application deployment including capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring, but it gives full control over relevant AWS and underlining resources.  From the release:

“We are excited to announce AWS Elastic Beanstalk, an even easier way for developers to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. Easy to begin and impossible to outgrow, developers simply upload their application and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. At the same time, Elastic Beanstalk developers retain full control over the AWS resources powering their application and can access the underlying resources at any time.

“While the initial release of Elastic Beanstalk supports Java web application developers using the familiar Apache Tomcat software stack, Elastic Beanstalk is designed so that it can be extended to support multiple development stacks and programming languages in the future. AWS is actively working with solution providers on the APIs and capabilities needed to create additional Elastic Beanstalk offerings.”

ReadWriteWeb offers a closer look at what Beanstalk has to offer, saying, “Initially, AWS will only support Java, but the company plans to add support for other languages and application environments in the future. For example, Engine Yard is working with AWS to bring its Ruby on Rails stack to Elastic Beanstalk.”

While Java-only support is a rawback for Beanstalk, it still has its benefits as a fully customizable out-of the-box PaaS. The service is also reportedly built on standard software such as Apache Web Server, Tomcat, and the Enterprise Edition of the Java platform which would simplify migration off Beanstalk.

A few other updates we’ve seen from Amazon Web Services include the introduction of Amazon Cluster GPU Instances for HPC customers. In addition, we’ve also seen Amazon cutting its Simple Storage Service (S3) rates to as low as $0.01 per 1000 requests for PUT, COPY, POST or LIST requests.  Amazon Web Services are constantly being tweaked in order to stay relevant to the market, and in light of the booming interest in PaaS, it’s no wonder Amazon decided to launch its own VMForce competitor.