I was at a webinar last night about AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon’s newly released web app cloud deployment platform.

The timing of the webinar (10 a.m. PST == dinner time in the UK) meant that I had to leave before the end, but it was a pretty interesting introduction and left me wanting to check out.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a Java-Tomcat stack that allows easy deployment of JEE applications (via AWS itself, via an Eclipse toolkit, via the command line, or SDK/API). Perhaps the best thing about deployment is that you can change a bunch of configuration items a lot easier than having to redeploy.

The usual but incredibly useful stuff about scalability and growth being taken care for you holds just as it does for Google App Engine for Java. As does the fact that there’s a console with which you can monitor your apps – again via the AWS dashboard.

It comes with database support (MySQL, SQL*Server, Oracle, DB2). JRuby support is also in there and the stack seems more standard that the GAEJ stack. That coupled with the fact that you have root access so can go low-level with root access means a lot more flexibility than GAEJ gives.

AWS have a sample app that can be deployed so you can see although I’m not sure I get the point of that really (won’t anybody inclined to or capable of deploying will probably have their own sample Java web apps they’d like to try out anyway?).

Other platforms are planned, but Amazon were coy about even mentioning let alone committing to a roadmap on the webinar. I figured they just hadn’t decided yet but that’s no matter.

We’re planning to try it out in the next month or so with a JRuby port of Jair so will post up our findings as we go.