2.1. Elastic Beanstalk and AWS

Elastic Beanstalk is not a Google App Engine. And, even though it resembles Heroku a bit, it is quite different from that as well. The purpose of Beanstalk is not to be a simple solution that will scale infinitely. But, to borrow Amazon’s marketing, it is something that is “impossible to outgrow.”

Google App Engine (GAE) is a Platform as a Service, or PaaS. It is designed to manage everything for your application; it promises you won’t have to worry about anything anymore. GAE completely hides anything resembling servers, IP addresses, load balancers, backups, etc. Heroku is similar, except that it is built on top of Amazon AWS. Heroku wants you to “forget servers,” and promises to “run everything.”