Amazon announced a new product for Amazon Web Services today, called "AWS Elastic Beanstalk". The product, a new way for developers to deploy and manage apps in the AWS cloud, handles things like capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and app health monitoring.

Elastic Beanstalk leverages AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto-Scaling for infrastructure, which as the company points out, are already used by hundreds of thousands of businesses. Developers don’t need to be familiar with these services to get their apps running quickly, however, according to the company. 

They only need to upload their app to Elastic Beanstalk, and behind the scenes, the product handles the provisioning and deployment of the infrastructure needed to run the app. Amazon says that within a few minutes, the app can be accessed via a customized URL. 

"Elastic Beanstalk is easy to begin and impossible to outgrow," said Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services. "It automatically scales up or down as needed and developers don’t need to worry about the configuration required to set up their infrastructure on AWS."

"We’d been grappling with how to simplify application deployment and management on AWS without removing the flexibility and control our customers have come to expect," added Selipsky,"Once we started exploring the mental model of customers being able to ‘open the hood’ to tinker with the infrastructure management themselves, a light bulb went off and we realized we didn’t have to make this ‘either/or’ decision. AWS customers can now choose to have as much automation or as much control as they wish."

Amazon says that with Elastic Beanstalk and the AWS Free Usage Tier, getting started on AWS can be free.