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.

The last post a good month and a half ago spoke about porting our revenue management product Jair to JRuby and deploying on Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk.

Well, we’ve ported the app and apart from a few hiccups with gem versions not being supported in JRuby – we had to upgrade from the CSV to FasterCSV gem which I guess is no bad thing! – all went smoothly.

I really like JRuby as there’s something satisfying about writing in Ruby but deploying on to Tomcat. Even more satisfying is when the application actually runs up on Tomcat!

I’m not yet fully convinced as on shutdown Tomcat issues dire warnings about memory leaks being “likely to happen” but we’re going to do some application profiling soon so we’ll see.

Rather than use Elastic Beanstalk (only available in Amazon’s US regions at the moment) we just deployed on to a customised Bitnami Tomcat stack on AWS EC2. Again, this seemed a lot easier than the last time I tried although perhaps that’s down to having the right tools installed beforehand(!).

I’ve got a bunch of tips / things that we learned from the porting exercise and also AWS deployment so I’ll post those up in the next few days.

For us, AWS rather than GAEJ, is the way forward. Although there are different services on GAEJ (can only think of caching and IM offhand) so it could be useful for some apps, but how long before AWS offer the same? As well as that with AWS there is the freedom to install things like memcached etc.

I do feel a bit guilty though every day at 4p.m. when the True North chatbot (one of our apps on the Google App Engine) pings me on IM … maybe it’ll be its turn for porting next.