As far as multiple apps per VM, have you taken a look at OpsWorks? It seems to be aiming to be as automatic as Elastic Beanstalk, but significantly more flexibl

As far as multiple apps per VM, have you taken a look at OpsWorks? It seems to be aiming to be as automatic as Elastic Beanstalk, but significantly more flexible (at the expense of up-front configuration effort). It certainly is unfortunate that CloudSearch doesn't scale down smaller, I had to skip it for the same reason.