Amazon this week launched the beta release of a new service called the Elastic Beanstalk, which was created to help Java developers quickly deploy and manage applications within the AWS cloud. Developers typically have to spend additional time dealing with architectural limitations or incorporating load balancing capabilities into their applications. The Elastic Beanstalk eliminates such necessities by provisioning the requisite compute capacity automatically, performing load balancing between servers, while also monitoring the health of the application.

Adam Selipsky, vice president of Amazon Web Services sums it up this way to IDG News: "You simply write your Java app as you would for any infrastructure you were going to deploy it on, upload it and it runs." While Elastic Beanstalk uses the popular Apache Tomcat stack at the moment, Amazon says the Elastic Beanstalk can be extended to work with additional programming languages; it will be interesting to see which platform Amazon will support next.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at PC World
- check out this article at eWeek

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