Beanstalk

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wp:AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a proprietary orchestration service offered from Amazon Web Services for deploying infrastructure which orchestrates various AWS services, including EC2, S3, Simple Notification Service (SNS), CloudWatch, autoscaling, and Elastic Load Balancers.[2]

At Amazon AWS, they have a product called CloudFormation (an alternative, subscription-based model to Beanstalk) which provides a declarative template-based Infrastructure as Code model for configuring AWS. See the Amazon CloudFormation User Guide

Comparison to QualityBox

The value of Infrastructure as Code can be broken down into three, measurable categories: Cost (reduction), Speed (faster execution), and Risk (remove errors and security violations). With QualityBox, we approach Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with all three types: declarative (functional), imperative (procedural) and intelligent (environment aware). These can be easily summarized as 'What', 'How' and 'Why'. That is to say that we define ***what*** the eventual target configuration should be. We define ***how*** the infrastructure should be changed to meet this. (Given A, how do we get to A'; or even B). And we even determine the 'what' with intelligence about existing work-loads, co-dependent applications, or other parameters that would dictate the preferred end state before we execute any changes. [1]

Work-alike systems from different vendors, or in different languages include RedHat's Ansible Tower, Puppet, CFEngine, SaltStack, HashiCorp's Terraform, and many others[2]

. At AWS, they have no less than 4 systems of their own:

  • AWS CloudFormation announced on February 2011[52] provides a declarative template-based Infrastructure as Code model for configuring AWS.[53]
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides deployment and management of applications in the cloud.
  • AWS OpsWorks provides configuration of EC2 services using Chef.
  • AWS CodeDeploy provides automated code deployment to EC2 instances.


Aside

How Amazon perverts the rational understanding of what they provide:

  1. They call the web interface the "console". Traditionally, the console is the exact opposite of a Graphical User Interface.
  2. They constantly explain their products in relationship to what you can do with the "Free" tier, however none of their products are Free as in freedom. They are exactly the opposite: a walled garden with vendor lock-in and proprietary techniques, tools, and dependencies.

References

  1. More at wp:Infrastructure as Code
    • Microsoft Azure Web Sites
    • Cloud Foundry
    • Bluemix
    • AppScale
    • Google App Engine
    • Heroku
    • Engine Yard
    • OpenShift
    • Jelastic
    • Oracle Application Container Cloud
    • ...