Amazon aims to ease cloud app deployment

AWS's new Elastic Beanstalk promises to remove the day-to-day burden of deploying applications in the cloud

Online retailer Amazon.com has beefed up its cloud computing offering with a new set of developer tools that makes it easier to manage the day-to-day tasks associated with deploying cloud applications.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles capacity provisioning, load balancing and application health monitoring.

"Developers don't need to worry about the configuration required to set up their infrastructure on AWS," said Adam Selipsky, vice president of AWS. "AWS customers can now choose to have as much automation or as much control as they wish."

The first version of Elastic Beanstalk is built for Java web application developers but it has been designed so that it can be extended to other development stacks and programming languages.

Taking away the management burden of deploying applications is unlikely to convince any IT chief wary about deploying cloud services, said James Governor, an industry analyst with market watcher RedMonk.

But it would undoubtedly appeal to developers, he added.

"Amazon is great at automating things that are a pain, which is why developers love it so much," he said.

AWS's platform-as-a-service approach will rival that of Google, which launched its own App Engine for Business last year, Salesforce.com's Force, and Microsoft's Azure platform.