Elastic Beanstalk (EBS) is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering from AWS (https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/). The idea is that you focus mostly on developing your application and leave configuration of servers (including installation of required software), load balancing, log file management, and so on to the PaaS provider. However, you do not have as much control over the servers in Elastic Beanstalk as you would when provisioning your own EC2 instances.

EBS provides preconfigured hosting solutions for different platforms, including one for Java. It provides servers with Tomcat preconfigured. You simply upload your WAR file and the application is deployed. In this section, we will learn how to deploy a RESTful web service in EBS.

Recall that we developed the CourseManagmenetREST service in Chapter 9, Creating Web Services. We will deploy the same service using EBS in a Tomcat EBS platform. Make sure that you have created the WAR file for the CourseManagmenetREST project—import the project in Eclipse, if you haven't already done so, right-click on the project in Project Explorer, and select Run As | Maven Install. This will create the CourseManagementREST-1.war file in the target folder. We will deploy this WAR file using EBS in a Tomcat server.