Amazon’s ‘Elastic Beanstalk’ Now Supports Python

Amazon recently announced that AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python, and seamless database integration. If you’re not familiar with Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Beanstalk is a quick and simple way to deploy applications to AWS. By using the AWS Management Console, Git deployment, or an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Eclipse or Visual Studio to upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. Within minutes, your application will be ready to use without any infrastructure or resource configuration work on your part.

Amazon claims it is now the easiest way to deploy and manage scalable PHP, Java, .NET, and Python applications on AWS. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles all of the details associated with deployment including provisioning of Amazon EC2 instances, load balancing, auto scaling, and application health monitoring.

Integration with Amazon Rational Database Service (RDS)

Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud, making it a practical fit for scalable web applications running on Elastic Beanstalk. If your application requires a relational database, Elastic Beanstalk can create an Amazon RDS database instance to use with your application. The RDS database instance is automatically configured to communicate with the Amazon EC2 instances running your application. Once the RDS database instance is provisioned, you can retrieve information about the database from your application using environment variables:

Ability to Customize your Python Environment

 You can also customize the Python runtime for Elastic Beanstalk using a set of declarative text files within your application. If your application contains a requirements.txt in its top level directory, Elastic Beanstalk will automatically install the dependencies using pip. Elastic Beanstalk is also introducing a new configuration mechanism that allows you to install packages from yum, run setup scripts, and set environment variables. You simply create a “.ebextensions” directory inside your application and add a “python.config” file in it. Elastic Beanstalk loads this configuration file and installs the yum packages, runs any scripts, and then sets environment variables.

For more information about using Python and Elastic Beanstalk, visit the Developer Guide.

Frank Toscano is a 15+ year specialist in cloud based services focusing on Product Management, Marketing and Security within the Cloud. He has worked for EasyLink Services and Premiere Global Services in a global role providing hosted services to Fortune 1000 clients. He is currently seeking employment with a cloud based provider in a senior level Product/Marketing role.