Running modern Elastic Beanstalk applications can be quite a daunting task. To be able to run the Elastic Beanstalk application code, the operations team will usually be required to maintain a set of inter-dependent resources consisting of the following:

• A host with an operating system
• A programming language interpreter
• An application server with prerequisites such as frameworks, runtimes, libraries, and modules
• An HTTP service to present the Elastic Beanstalk application
• External components such as load balancers, databases, message queues, and so on

A whole lot of resources can be spent operating, maintaining, updating, patching, and making sure that the service is reliable, resilient, and highly available. Sometimes, it feels like it would be wonderful to have a service that could do all of this for us. Well, we have one—the AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

When our business requirements dictate that we need to reduce the management overhead in our development cycle, then Elastic Beanstalk is the perfect solution. With Elastic Beanstalk, the complete set of underlying resources is managed by AWS and we simply provide the code and a definition for the running environment. Being able to put 100% of our focus on the code frees our developers and SysOps engineers from having to design, deliver, operate, and maintain the infrastructure and lets us cut down on management overhead by a sizeable factor.