Elastic Beanstalk: Amazon welcomes Ruby developers to its cloud

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) team has announced that its Elastic Beanstalk Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution now supports applications written in the Ruby programming language. Amazon had announced Elastic Beanstalk in early 2011. Initially only available to Java developers, the service began to support PHP applications last spring. Since May, it has also been possible to run .NET applications, and recently the developers added Python applications.

Ruby applications that are placed in the PaaS must support Phusion Passenger, a Rails/Rack module for the Apache HTTP and nginx servers. The developers list Rails and Sinatra as the supported Ruby web frameworks, and Amazon has provided deployment instructions for applications created with these frameworks. Applications can be installed from Git or via Elastic Beanstalk's command line tool or management console.

Amazon has also announced that Elastic Beanstalk environments can now operate in Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This allows users to reserve private areas within the AWS cloud where they can define custom network architectures that mostly conform to the conventional networks they know from their own data centres. Users can gain full control of their virtual network environments this way.

(djwm)