Amazon Launches PAAS as Beanstalk!

Service Highlights

Easy to begin – Elastic Beanstalk is a quick and simple way to deploy your application to AWS. Use the AWS Management Console or an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Eclipse to upload your application, and 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.

Impossible to outgrow – Elastic Beanstalk automatically scales your application up and down based on default Auto Scaling settings. You can easily adjust Auto Scaling settings based on your specific application's needs. For example, you can use CPU utilization to trigger Auto Scaling actions. With Elastic Beanstalk, your application can handle peaks in workload or traffic while minimizing your costs.

Complete control – Elastic Beanstalk lets you "open the hood" and retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application. If you decide you want to take over some (or all) of the elements of your infrastructure, you can do so seamlessly by using Elastic Beanstalk's management capabilities. For example, you can browse log files, monitor application health, adjust auto-scaling rules, setup email notifications, and even pass environment variables through the Elastic Beanstalk console.

Flexible – You have the freedom to select the Amazon EC2 instance type that is optimal for your application based on CPU and memory requirements, and can choose from several available database options. For example, you can specify a deployment consisting of high-memory instances if your web application has a large memory footprint.

Reliable – Elastic Beanstalk runs within Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters, and provides an environment where developers can run applications requiring high durability and availability.
↑ Top
Pricing

There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk – you only pay for the underlying AWS resources (e.g. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3) that your application consumes.

New AWS customers who are eligible for the AWS free usage tier can deploy an application in Elastic Beanstalk for free, as the default settings for Elastic Beanstalk allow a low traffic application to run within the free tier without incurring charges. If these applications require more resources than the default environment provides, customers will be charged the normal AWS rates for the incremental resources the application consumes.

The costs of running a web site using Elastic Beanstalk can vary based on several factors such as the number of EC2 instances needed to handle your web site traffic, the bandwidth consumed by your application, and which database or storage options your application uses. The principal costs for a web application will typically be for the EC2 instance(s) and for the Elastic Load Balancing that balances traffic between the instances running your application.

The table below is an example which shows the monthly costs of running a low traffic web site using the Elastic Beanstalk default settings, both with and without the AWS free tier:
Service and Resource Unit Cost Breakout Cost
Amazon EC2 t1.micro instance 1 $0.02/hr * 24 hours * 30 days $14.40
Elastic Load Balancer 1 $0.025/hr * 24 hours * 30 days $18.00
Elastic Load Balancer Data Processing 15GB $0.008/GB * 15GB $ 0.12
Elastic Block Store volume 8GB $0.10/GB * 8GB $ 0.80
S3 Storage for WAR File and Access 1GB $0.14/1GB + $0.01 for<1k PUTs, <10k GETs $ 0.15
Bandwidth In and Out 15GB 15 GB in * $0.10, 15 GB out * $0.15 $ 3.75
Total Monthly Cost without Free Tier $37.22
Total Monthly Cost with Free Tier $0

Source - http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/