7 ms·

Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk

209 points by jluxenberg 16y ago

piotrSikora 16y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118778 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118778
mmelin 16y ago
Wow. The benefits of Google App Engine without the limitations? Sure, an app on GAE is probably cheaper in terms of monthly expense, but factor in the development costs for a Java team unfamiliar with App Engine and Beanstalk is probably a far better investment.
- riffraff 16y ago
  no, with different limitations I believe, e.g. no cool google storage, but only SDB or RDB (which may be ok anyway)
  - saurik 16y ago
    To me, the limitations of App Engine are things like having to use a crippled version of the programming environment (as you don't get your own computer, so they've neutered things down to something "safe") and a bunch of limitations on CPU time, request length, and background processing. (edit: I had somehow read what you said to mean, "no, but with these new limitations", so arguably I should just delete my response here, but I think that a specific list of things might be valuable still)
    - nir 16y ago
      On the pro side, GAE gives you a pretty big free quota - http://therealurl.appspot.com http://therealurl.appspot.com handles >1m requests/day for about $4 a week.
  - brown9-2 16y ago
    If you can use JDBC or SQL in your Java app with these Amazon solutions and not have to learn a new datastore API that's a pretty huge advantage.
    - jbellis 16y ago
      Sure... until your database is your bottleneck.
      - ericflo 16y ago
        Exactly, which for many apps will be quite a while or will never happen.
  - mumrah 16y ago
    AWS is not without it's "cool" storage: SimpleDB, S3, RDS. Not to mention, being within AWS with full control of your machines, you can setup any database you'd like.
  - rbranson 16y ago
    I agree. It's definitely meh without a useful and truly scalable database. That's the hard part. SimpleDB isn't particularly useful, and RDB isn't particularly scalable.
    - tybris 16y ago
      Don't worry, by the time you'll be so big that you scale out of RDS, you'll be able to build your own datastore.
    - mongodb 16y ago
      Use MongoDB. It's web-scale.
jackowayed 16y ago
I'm not sure how useful this really is. It just handles the application layer, leaving you on your own for dealing with the database. Now, Amazon has some services to help you out (RDS, SimpleDB), but SimpleDB is kind of crap, and RDS is expensive. More importantly, that loses some of the simplicity, meaning that you still have to think about infrastructure to a degree. Heroku is git push to deploy, and if you have a standard Rails app, that's it. Whereas to deploy a standard Rails app, after you package up your app as a .war with JRuby (and deal with possible gem incompatibilities), you have to spin up an RDS instance too. And change the config in your Rails app so that it knows how to talk to the RDS instance. And if your RDS instance crashes, they backed it up for you, but you still have to manually restore from the backup. And once you're already thinking about infrastructure to that degree, you've lost a lot of the benefit of a PaaS.
- jonburs 16y ago
  RDS pricing appears competitive to Heroku's dedicated databases. It's hard to compare them directly since RDS separates instance type, on-demand and reserved instances, provisioned storage, replication (crossing availability zone boundaries), and number of requests. Heroku on the other hand provides a fixed amount of storage (and one that's twice the max one can provision for RDS), a mix of instance types, and a connection cap limit. It's not clear if Heroku provides multiple availability zone instances similar to RDS. Ignoring provisioned storage and request costs one can have a small on-demand RDS instance for ~$80/month. Heroku's instance (RAM/CPU) equivalent (Ronin) is $200/month.
- andrewgodwin 16y ago
  As one of the two people working on something similar to Heroku or GAE (we're called ep.io), Beanstalk is simultaneously worrying and quite interesting - while it is an interesting player into the market, it's not _that_ hands-off, from what I can see, especially when it comes to databases, or things like Redis, which it's nice to have managed for you as well. It's possible we'll see people springing up on EC2 offering those as separate services, however. The other interesting part is that, since they don't do shared hosting but make you use a whole EC2 instance, there's potential for it to cost considerably more for smaller sites, but only once you get past that free plan of theirs (then again, the disk I/O on the Micro instances is truly awful)
chanri 16y ago
Just to be clear, this is only for Java apps right? This does not include PHP or Python?
- rayval 16y ago
  Apache Tomcat in the cloud.
- jonburs 16y ago
  From what I can gather the current beta version only supports Java (i.e., war packaged) apps, but the intention is to support other kinds of application containers in the future. Conceivably one could use jython or quercos to deploy python or php applications.
- buro9 16y ago
  At the moment that appears so. If you wanted something similar for Python or PHP then you could use VMWares VApp stuff which gives you the PaaS solution on top of hardware hosted by Colt which gives you the IaaS solution. The reason that the VMWare offer gives you Python, PHP or other stuff, is that under-the-hood VMWare are using Chef and you can run your own custom Recipes, hence you could deploy whatever you want as a managed platform... though you would lose the Eclipse right-click deploy (though honestly if you're deploying from CI you're probably not going to be using this anyway). Edit: It being almost impossible to just find simple and clear documentation on the VMWare site, this is the info link I've managed to unearth: http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director/overview.html http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director/overview.html The key point is that you could create a virtual datacenter, hosted with a 3rd party like Colt, and then use Chef to manage it as a platform, and deploy directly to it as if you owned your own "Elastic Beanstalk". As an aside, I for one am getting tired of the never-ending list of acronyms and strange product names that are coming out from every vendor.
- tow21 16y ago
  Presumably Jython would be pretty easy to get running, and you can run eg Django on Jython: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/jython/ http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/jython/
- 16y ago
latch 16y ago
AWS never fit into my definition of a "cloud" solution. It's a VPS with a rich API and a lot of addons (load balancer, EBS, S3...). From what I'm reading, Beanstalk changes this and clearly puts AWS in the category they've long claimed to be in. Not that their service wasn't great/unique before. This just puts them that much further ahead. It's along the lines of what Heroku does with their routing mesh layer (as far as I understand it).
- chanri 16y ago
  Amazon's execution with EC2 over the past few years has been excellent. If Amazon makes a Rails version of Beanstalk, Heroku should be worried as Beanstalk could take some market share from Heroku.
  - rchowe 16y ago
    Heroku will probably still have the advantage of being git-based. I doubt Amazon will support git with beanstalk. Now, Amazon may start siphoning off python users that switched to rails just to use Heroku.
  - _pdeschen 16y ago
    According to press release “We’re working with AWS to provide an Elastic Beanstalk Ruby on Rails container that leverages the optimized Engine Yard stack which has been battle-tested by thousands of high-growth companies.” John Dillon, CEO of Engine Yard http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110119005591/en/Amazon-Web-Services-Introduces-AWS-Elastic-Beanstalk http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110119005591/en/Amaz...
  - evanjacobs 16y ago
    I was curious why Amazon let Heroku be acquired by Salesforce late last year. Now I know it's because they were already working on Beanstalk.
- tybris 16y ago
  What's your definition of a "cloud" solution?
kumarshantanu 16y ago
Questions: What does Elastic BeanStalk mean for me? 1. Can my database auto-scale? 2. Can my JVM heap auto-scale beyond 2 GB without GC pauses?
- wmf 16y ago
  It's built on EC2, so no and no.
jollojou 16y ago
At the moment I'm able to launch applications in the US East region only. When will the other regions support Elastic Beanstalk?
- hallmark 16y ago
  Yes, US East region only for now. From their official FAQ, other regions in the future: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/faqs/#regions http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/faqs/#regions
FiReaNG3L 16y ago
Would that make a good fit for an Apache Solr server? Put the index on EBS?
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Just to assist with cross-referencing, there's another, slightly older discussion of this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118778 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118778
ekiara 16y ago
Sounds like a great idea, though the naming is a bit unfortunate, there might be some confusion between the Git hosting and collaboration application: beanstalkapp.com.
- taylorbuley 16y ago
  An Amazon marketer might say that's Beanstalkapp's problem now
dholowiski 16y ago
"beanstalk is built using a number of existing AWS services, not from magic beans."
jread 16y ago
This is cool, but not earth shattering. It is essentially a management stack/abstraction layer/deployment tool on top of existing AWS services: EC2, CloudWatch, load balancing, route 53, autoscaling, AMIs. It is a PaaS sort of... but single-tenant and not in the same sense as a multi-tenant, higher level PaaS like AppEngine or Heroku. Elastic Beanstalk gives you flexibility (full root access - do whatever you want), but with that comes more responsibility from a management perspective, and more opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot.
ecaroth 16y ago
Cool new feature. Not too tough to see this coming though. One of the biggest barriers of entry to AWS has always been scaling/deployment. With companies like Cloudkick and Scalr helping to alleviate this, but being somewhat platform agnostic (Cloudkick supports aws, rackspace cloud, etc) Amazon would want to have an all-encompasing solution that has more of a vendor-lock in to their products. With solutions like Beanstalk and their free web tier, AWS is becoming easier to step right into each day. I predict that in a few years there will be no such thing as shared web hosting...
zoomzoom 16y ago
The real question is: can this offering compete with the specialized PaaS services we have seen emerge in the last year - heroku, GAE, djangy.djangozoom/eldairon, various node.js services, phpfog, etc... The specialized services will be less work to maintain for developers, and will offer unique additional features that Amazon will have a hard time keeping up with if they try to spread themselves too thin.
- bialecki 16y ago
  Because Iwork mainly in Python, I just checked out the offerings you mentioned for Python that aren't GAE. Both Djangy and Djangozoom are in private beta still, so I can't imagine they're that far along. Eldarion doesn't look self serve, although maybe that's just their site. It seems likely that, not only can Amazon compete, but could probably dominate. Heroku is a big outlier and really the first to demonstrate that the need/power of a PaaS. It doesn't look like there's anything nearly as mature for Python. Don't know about other languages/frameworks, but if it's like Python, Amazon has a big opportunity here.
  - clarkevans 16y ago
    I'd also like to see a Python (WSGI) solution for AWS. I've had the opportunity to play around with andrewgodwin's ep.io and while also in private beta, is worth some attention.
  - zoomzoom 16y ago
    Agreed - the only one I have actually used is GAE, and I was definitely not trying to endorse the other services as "too good to beat." Just trying to say that with all the different stacks out there for different languages and purposes there will be a benefit to specialization, which might not benefit from amazon's skillset as much as the provisioning of VPS's and other infrastructure has. For python hosting, GAE is probably the only real competition at this point. There is a HUGE opportunity to eliminate sysadmin work on all these stacks for smaller developers especially. I am just not sure if Amazon will domiate both the infrastructure and platform layer.
vladmars 16y ago
There's still plenty of room for competition. Beanstalk is limited in its ability to innovate because it is simply a management layer on top of AWS, which will restrict its potential feature offerings. I think smaller developers stand to reap huge productivity benefits from easier to use and more feature-rich platforms such as Heroku.
- jburwell 16y ago
  Why is being a "simple" management layer atop AWS limiting? Bear in mind that Heroku is, in your terms, simply a management layer atop AWS. Using it as a technical yardstick and considering Amazon's strong financial position and commitment, it stands to reason that there is a long runway for Beanstalk's innovation.
hallmark 16y ago
It's easy to find holes in this announcement: Beanstalk doesn't have X, or they compare unfavorably to AppEngine and Heroku in certain areas. The bigger news here is that Amazon has staked a flag in the ground and decidedly shown their intention to enter the PaaS arena. What has AWS done in the past? They've introduced a new product, then over time: 1) Made it easier to manage 2) Made it more automated 3) Added additional bits of functionality Why would we not expect them to do the same with Beanstalk?

209 points by jluxenberg 16y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118778 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118778

Wow. The benefits of Google App Engine without the limitations? Sure, an app on GAE is probably cheaper in terms of monthly expense, but factor in the development costs for a Java team unfamiliar with App Engine and Beanstalk is probably a far better investment.

riffraff 16y ago
no, with different limitations I believe, e.g. no cool google storage, but only SDB or RDB (which may be ok anyway)
- saurik 16y ago
  To me, the limitations of App Engine are things like having to use a crippled version of the programming environment (as you don't get your own computer, so they've neutered things down to something "safe") and a bunch of limitations on CPU time, request length, and background processing. (edit: I had somehow read what you said to mean, "no, but with these new limitations", so arguably I should just delete my response here, but I think that a specific list of things might be valuable still)
  - nir 16y ago
    On the pro side, GAE gives you a pretty big free quota - http://therealurl.appspot.com http://therealurl.appspot.com handles >1m requests/day for about $4 a week.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  If you can use JDBC or SQL in your Java app with these Amazon solutions and not have to learn a new datastore API that's a pretty huge advantage.
  - jbellis 16y ago
    Sure... until your database is your bottleneck.
    - ericflo 16y ago
      Exactly, which for many apps will be quite a while or will never happen.
- mumrah 16y ago
  AWS is not without it's "cool" storage: SimpleDB, S3, RDS. Not to mention, being within AWS with full control of your machines, you can setup any database you'd like.
- rbranson 16y ago
  I agree. It's definitely meh without a useful and truly scalable database. That's the hard part. SimpleDB isn't particularly useful, and RDB isn't particularly scalable.
  - tybris 16y ago
    Don't worry, by the time you'll be so big that you scale out of RDS, you'll be able to build your own datastore.
  - mongodb 16y ago
    Use MongoDB. It's web-scale.

jackowayed 16y ago

I'm not sure how useful this really is. It just handles the application layer, leaving you on your own for dealing with the database. Now, Amazon has some services to help you out (RDS, SimpleDB), but SimpleDB is kind of crap, and RDS is expensive. More importantly, that loses some of the simplicity, meaning that you still have to think about infrastructure to a degree. Heroku is git push to deploy, and if you have a standard Rails app, that's it. Whereas to deploy a standard Rails app, after you package up your app as a .war with JRuby (and deal with possible gem incompatibilities), you have to spin up an RDS instance too. And change the config in your Rails app so that it knows how to talk to the RDS instance. And if your RDS instance crashes, they backed it up for you, but you still have to manually restore from the backup. And once you're already thinking about infrastructure to that degree, you've lost a lot of the benefit of a PaaS.

jonburs 16y ago
RDS pricing appears competitive to Heroku's dedicated databases. It's hard to compare them directly since RDS separates instance type, on-demand and reserved instances, provisioned storage, replication (crossing availability zone boundaries), and number of requests. Heroku on the other hand provides a fixed amount of storage (and one that's twice the max one can provision for RDS), a mix of instance types, and a connection cap limit. It's not clear if Heroku provides multiple availability zone instances similar to RDS. Ignoring provisioned storage and request costs one can have a small on-demand RDS instance for ~$80/month. Heroku's instance (RAM/CPU) equivalent (Ronin) is $200/month.
andrewgodwin 16y ago
As one of the two people working on something similar to Heroku or GAE (we're called ep.io), Beanstalk is simultaneously worrying and quite interesting - while it is an interesting player into the market, it's not _that_ hands-off, from what I can see, especially when it comes to databases, or things like Redis, which it's nice to have managed for you as well. It's possible we'll see people springing up on EC2 offering those as separate services, however. The other interesting part is that, since they don't do shared hosting but make you use a whole EC2 instance, there's potential for it to cost considerably more for smaller sites, but only once you get past that free plan of theirs (then again, the disk I/O on the Micro instances is truly awful)

chanri 16y ago

Just to be clear, this is only for Java apps right? This does not include PHP or Python?

rayval 16y ago
Apache Tomcat in the cloud.
jonburs 16y ago
From what I can gather the current beta version only supports Java (i.e., war packaged) apps, but the intention is to support other kinds of application containers in the future. Conceivably one could use jython or quercos to deploy python or php applications.
buro9 16y ago
At the moment that appears so. If you wanted something similar for Python or PHP then you could use VMWares VApp stuff which gives you the PaaS solution on top of hardware hosted by Colt which gives you the IaaS solution. The reason that the VMWare offer gives you Python, PHP or other stuff, is that under-the-hood VMWare are using Chef and you can run your own custom Recipes, hence you could deploy whatever you want as a managed platform... though you would lose the Eclipse right-click deploy (though honestly if you're deploying from CI you're probably not going to be using this anyway). Edit: It being almost impossible to just find simple and clear documentation on the VMWare site, this is the info link I've managed to unearth: http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director/overview.html http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud-director/overview.html The key point is that you could create a virtual datacenter, hosted with a 3rd party like Colt, and then use Chef to manage it as a platform, and deploy directly to it as if you owned your own "Elastic Beanstalk". As an aside, I for one am getting tired of the never-ending list of acronyms and strange product names that are coming out from every vendor.
tow21 16y ago
Presumably Jython would be pretty easy to get running, and you can run eg Django on Jython: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/jython/ http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/jython/
16y ago

latch 16y ago

AWS never fit into my definition of a "cloud" solution. It's a VPS with a rich API and a lot of addons (load balancer, EBS, S3...). From what I'm reading, Beanstalk changes this and clearly puts AWS in the category they've long claimed to be in. Not that their service wasn't great/unique before. This just puts them that much further ahead. It's along the lines of what Heroku does with their routing mesh layer (as far as I understand it).

chanri 16y ago
Amazon's execution with EC2 over the past few years has been excellent. If Amazon makes a Rails version of Beanstalk, Heroku should be worried as Beanstalk could take some market share from Heroku.
- rchowe 16y ago
  Heroku will probably still have the advantage of being git-based. I doubt Amazon will support git with beanstalk. Now, Amazon may start siphoning off python users that switched to rails just to use Heroku.
- _pdeschen 16y ago
  According to press release “We’re working with AWS to provide an Elastic Beanstalk Ruby on Rails container that leverages the optimized Engine Yard stack which has been battle-tested by thousands of high-growth companies.” John Dillon, CEO of Engine Yard http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110119005591/en/Amazon-Web-Services-Introduces-AWS-Elastic-Beanstalk http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110119005591/en/Amaz...
- evanjacobs 16y ago
  I was curious why Amazon let Heroku be acquired by Salesforce late last year. Now I know it's because they were already working on Beanstalk.
tybris 16y ago
What's your definition of a "cloud" solution?

kumarshantanu 16y ago

Questions: What does Elastic BeanStalk mean for me? 1. Can my database auto-scale? 2. Can my JVM heap auto-scale beyond 2 GB without GC pauses?

wmf 16y ago
It's built on EC2, so no and no.

jollojou 16y ago

At the moment I'm able to launch applications in the US East region only. When will the other regions support Elastic Beanstalk?

hallmark 16y ago
Yes, US East region only for now. From their official FAQ, other regions in the future: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/faqs/#regions http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/faqs/#regions

FiReaNG3L 16y ago

Would that make a good fit for an Apache Solr server? Put the index on EBS?

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago

Just to assist with cross-referencing, there's another, slightly older discussion of this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118778 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118778

ekiara 16y ago

Sounds like a great idea, though the naming is a bit unfortunate, there might be some confusion between the Git hosting and collaboration application: beanstalkapp.com.

taylorbuley 16y ago
An Amazon marketer might say that's Beanstalkapp's problem now

dholowiski 16y ago

"beanstalk is built using a number of existing AWS services, not from magic beans."

jread 16y ago

This is cool, but not earth shattering. It is essentially a management stack/abstraction layer/deployment tool on top of existing AWS services: EC2, CloudWatch, load balancing, route 53, autoscaling, AMIs. It is a PaaS sort of... but single-tenant and not in the same sense as a multi-tenant, higher level PaaS like AppEngine or Heroku. Elastic Beanstalk gives you flexibility (full root access - do whatever you want), but with that comes more responsibility from a management perspective, and more opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot.

ecaroth 16y ago

Cool new feature. Not too tough to see this coming though. One of the biggest barriers of entry to AWS has always been scaling/deployment. With companies like Cloudkick and Scalr helping to alleviate this, but being somewhat platform agnostic (Cloudkick supports aws, rackspace cloud, etc) Amazon would want to have an all-encompasing solution that has more of a vendor-lock in to their products. With solutions like Beanstalk and their free web tier, AWS is becoming easier to step right into each day. I predict that in a few years there will be no such thing as shared web hosting...

zoomzoom 16y ago

The real question is: can this offering compete with the specialized PaaS services we have seen emerge in the last year - heroku, GAE, djangy.djangozoom/eldairon, various node.js services, phpfog, etc... The specialized services will be less work to maintain for developers, and will offer unique additional features that Amazon will have a hard time keeping up with if they try to spread themselves too thin.

bialecki 16y ago
Because Iwork mainly in Python, I just checked out the offerings you mentioned for Python that aren't GAE. Both Djangy and Djangozoom are in private beta still, so I can't imagine they're that far along. Eldarion doesn't look self serve, although maybe that's just their site. It seems likely that, not only can Amazon compete, but could probably dominate. Heroku is a big outlier and really the first to demonstrate that the need/power of a PaaS. It doesn't look like there's anything nearly as mature for Python. Don't know about other languages/frameworks, but if it's like Python, Amazon has a big opportunity here.
- clarkevans 16y ago
  I'd also like to see a Python (WSGI) solution for AWS. I've had the opportunity to play around with andrewgodwin's ep.io and while also in private beta, is worth some attention.
- zoomzoom 16y ago
  Agreed - the only one I have actually used is GAE, and I was definitely not trying to endorse the other services as "too good to beat." Just trying to say that with all the different stacks out there for different languages and purposes there will be a benefit to specialization, which might not benefit from amazon's skillset as much as the provisioning of VPS's and other infrastructure has. For python hosting, GAE is probably the only real competition at this point. There is a HUGE opportunity to eliminate sysadmin work on all these stacks for smaller developers especially. I am just not sure if Amazon will domiate both the infrastructure and platform layer.

vladmars 16y ago

There's still plenty of room for competition. Beanstalk is limited in its ability to innovate because it is simply a management layer on top of AWS, which will restrict its potential feature offerings. I think smaller developers stand to reap huge productivity benefits from easier to use and more feature-rich platforms such as Heroku.

jburwell 16y ago
Why is being a "simple" management layer atop AWS limiting? Bear in mind that Heroku is, in your terms, simply a management layer atop AWS. Using it as a technical yardstick and considering Amazon's strong financial position and commitment, it stands to reason that there is a long runway for Beanstalk's innovation.

hallmark 16y ago

It's easy to find holes in this announcement: Beanstalk doesn't have X, or they compare unfavorably to AppEngine and Heroku in certain areas. The bigger news here is that Amazon has staked a flag in the ground and decidedly shown their intention to enter the PaaS arena. What has AWS done in the past? They've introduced a new product, then over time: 1) Made it easier to manage 2) Made it more automated 3) Added additional bits of functionality Why would we not expect them to do the same with Beanstalk?