AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- What it is
- Platform as a Service (PaaS). Upload application code; Beanstalk provisions and manages the infrastructure.
- Handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto scaling, health monitoring, and deployments.
- Key nuance: you still own the resources
- It creates real EC2 instances, load balancers, and Auto Scaling groups in your account.
- You can SSH in and tune them. You still pay for the underlying resources.
- Beanstalk itself costs nothing extra.
- Not to be confused with
- AWS CloudFormation — declarative IaC for any resource; you describe exactly what you want. Beanstalk decides for you.
- AWS Lambda — no servers at all; Beanstalk still runs servers, it just manages them.
- AWS CodeDeploy — deploys code to existing infrastructure; Beanstalk creates the infrastructure too.
- Exam signal
- “Deploy a web app quickly without managing infrastructure, but keep control of the resources” → Beanstalk.