I spent a lot of time talking to AWS developers, many working in the gaming and mobile space, and most of them have been finding Node.js well suited for their web applications. With its asynchronous, event-driven programming model, Node.js allows these developers to handle a large number of concurrent connections with low latencies. These developers typically use EC2 instances combined with one of our database services to create web services used for data retrievals or to create dynamic mobile interfaces.

Today, AWS Elastic Beanstalk just added support for Node.js to help developers easily deploy and manage these web applications on AWS. Elastic Beanstalk automates the provisioning, monitoring, and configuration of many underlying AWS resources such as Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and EC2. Elastic Beanstalk also provides automation to deploy your application, rotate your logs, and customize your EC2 instances. To get started, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

Two years, lots of progress, and more to come…

Almost two years ago, we launched Elastic Beanstalk to help developers deploy and manage web applications on AWS. The team has made significant progress and continues to iterate at a phenomenal rate.

Elastic Beanstalk now supports Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js, and .NET. You can deploy and manage your applications in any AWS region (except for GovCloud). Many tools are available for you to deploy and manage your application, just choose your favorite flavor. If you’re building Java applications, you can use the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse. If you’re building .NET applications, you can use the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. If you prefer to work in a terminal, you can use a command line tool called ‘eb’ along with Git. Partners like eXoCloud IDE also offer integration with Elastic Beanstalk.

Elastic Beanstalk seamlessly connects your application to an RDS database, secures your application inside a VPC, and allows you to integrate with any AWS resource using a new mechanism called configuration files. Simply put, Elastic Beanstalk is highly customizable to meet the needs of your applications.

Who is using Elastic Beanstalk?

Companies of all sizes are using Elastic Beanstalk. Intuit for example uses Elastic Beanstalk for a mobile application backend called txtweb. Peel uses Elastic Beanstalk to host a real-time web service that interacts with DynamoDB.

The one commonality for all these customers is the time savings and the productivity increase that they get when using Elastic Beanstalk. Elastic Beanstalk helps them focus on their applications, on scaling their applications, and on meeting tight deadlines. Productivity gains don’t always mean that you merely deliver things faster. Sometimes with increased productivity, you can also do more with less.

The Elastic Beanstalk team helped me get some data around how small teams can build large scale applications. One company with less than 10 employees runs a mobile backend on Elastic Beanstalk that handles an average of 17,000 requests per second and peak traffic of more than 20,000 requests per second. The company drove the project from development to delivery in less than 2 weeks. It’s very impressive to see the innovation and scale that Elastic Beanstalk can provide even for small teams.