100 Days of AWS – Day 11

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100 Days of AWS – Day 11: Intro to AWS Elastic Beanstalk (PaaS)

Welcome to Day 11! So far in our compute week, we've focused on EC2, which is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering. Today, we're moving up a level of abstraction to a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering: AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

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The Question

A development team wants to quickly deploy a standard Python web application. They want to simply upload their code, and have AWS automatically handle the provisioning of servers, load balancing, and auto-scaling.

Which AWS service is the best choice for this "just upload your code" approach?

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The Correct Answer

The correct answer is (B) AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

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Why It's Correct: Your Application, AWS's Infrastructure

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services. You simply upload your application code, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling to application health monitoring.

Think of it this way:

• EC2 (IaaS): AWS gives you a plot of land and building materials. You have to build the house, set up the plumbing, and manage all the utilities yourself.
• Elastic Beanstalk (PaaS): AWS gives you a fully managed apartment. You just bring your furniture (your code), and the building management handles the structure, plumbing, and electricity (the infrastructure) for you.

You retain control over the underlying AWS resources but you don't have to manage them directly, making it perfect for developers who want to focus on writing code.

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Analysis of the Incorrect Options

• (A) AWS EC2: Using EC2 would require the team to manually provision the virtual servers, install the Python runtime, configure a web server, set up a load balancer, and create an auto-scaling group. This is the opposite of the "just upload your code" requirement.
• (C) AWS Lambda: This is a serverless, event-driven compute service (Function as a Service). It's designed to run code in response to triggers, not to host a continuously running web application server.
• (D) AWS CloudFormation: This is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) service. It allows you to define and provision all the infrastructure resources (like EC2, Load Balancers) in a template, but it doesn't manage the application deployment or the platform itself. It's the blueprint for the house, not the managed apartment.

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When to Use Elastic Beanstalk

• Rapidly deploying web applications.
• When you don't have a dedicated DevOps team to manage infrastructure.
• For standard application architectures (e.g., web servers, worker tiers).
• When you want a simple, managed platform with the option to access the underlying resources if needed.

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Further Reading

• Official AWS Documentation: What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?