The service, launched in beta, is primarily aimed at developers who either can't or don't want to manage every little detail about the deployment of their app in the cloud, such as load balancing, auto scaling and health monitoring. However, Elastic Beanstalk lets developers keep full control over the AWS resources powering their app, if they choose to handle it themselves.
"This is for customers building applications that may not have the technical depth to manage the underlying compute infrastructure. Beanstalk is completely black-boxed," says the vice president of web services at Amazon, Adam Selipsky.
The initial release of Elastic Beanstalk supports Java, using the Apache Tomcat software stack, but Amazon claims the service is designed "so that it can be extended to support multiple development stacks and programming languages in the future."