One of the most popular services on the Amazon cloud, Elastic Beanstalk is the fastest and simplest way for developers to get an application up and running on AWS.

All they have to do is to upload the code of their app to the platform, and the service automatically handles all the necessary details like resource provisioning, load balancing, and scaling. Relying on the cloud also makes things easier for administrators as well.

No wonder, EB has found a high level of acceptance among cloud users, individual and enterprise.

What is Elastic Beanstalk?

Back before cloud took over the world, developers used to create desktop applications to harness the power of computers. They still do. In many situations, programmers need the power and flexibility that this type of coding and development offers. But more and more app development has been occurring with the web in mind — for the simple reason of convenience.

Users demand applications that they can run on any device, anywhere, in the same way.

This has brought web browsers into the picture, because to make the above happen, developers design web apps that can run in a browser or a browser like environment. This is where Elastic Beanstalk comes into play. EB enables developers to create applications that can run anywhere, on any device, and more importantly, don’t suffer from problems of reliability and scalability.

Relying on the cloud offers these benefits, and more. Administrators can tweak or change an application configuration from anywhere. And developers can scale their solutions using the Amazon cloud platform, without worrying about issues that can occur when using a company owned host.

Your EB adventure

Once you are done coding your application, the three most essential parts of EB are installing it on the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk platform, making updates, and getting rid of the apps after you finish using them. Your EB adventure will revolve around these three main areas of focus.

And since Elastic Beanstalk is a compute service, just like other AWS offerings like EC2 and Lambda, it is inherently complex as it is feature rich. When you upload your code to Elastic Beanstalk, the service runs the code on your behalf using the underlying Amazon Web Services infrastructure. It takes care of provisioning and managing the resources necessary to run your applications, making it ideal for cloud users that don’t want to worry about these minute details.

You can directly come to Elastic Beanstalk with your code, have it deployed, get it running instantly, all the while using various SDK and code libraries that Amazon has made available for the platform.

Finally, whether your application is public or private, you likely want to monitor it. AWS offers a range of native EB functionalities to perform this task. These monitoring features integrate all your application activities using a single interface, ensuring tight integration between the monitoring software and the app in the process.

We shall be learning about all this and more, in elaborate detail, in future articles.