Yes. Elastic Beanstalk is great for deploying your code to EC2.
However Cloud 66 doesn't end at the end of deployment. It actively manages the app by monitoring the processes, making it extremely easy to add load balancers, scale web servers or background processes, add SSL certificates, schedule backups with one click and a lot more.
It is also not limited to AWS and supports Linode, Joyent, Telefonica Cloud with Rackspace and Digital Ocean coming soon.
This is on top of having all this on your own servers if you would like to have dedicated or colocated one in a data centre for whatever reason.
Actually attended a local user group presentation on elastic beanstalk last night.
Elastic Beanstalk not only handles auto scaling. You can set limits that enable it to launch a replacement server if your pages start responding slowly.
The new console lets you easily add SSL certificates and schedule backups. I was pleasantly surprised how much Amazon has added to it in the last few years.
I confirm all this. Elastic Beanstalk is so good, I don't even touch EC2 anymore. All my webapps are now being deployed through it. It costs more due to fact that each environment needs its own load-balancer even if only one server is involved which is extra $18/month but it is still worth.
If you deploy code that crashes webapp, just revert back to previous version. Problem fixed in a minute on all your servers.
And you don't even need to do that actually, spin new environment with new set of servers. Upload new version to new environment, do the testing, then promote this environment to production status (takes a few seconds), and terminate previous production environment.
Perhaps other companies can offer service like this too, but my platform of choice is ASP.NET which narrows the field quite a bit.
I guess where we are attempting to be different is we are providing this functionality in a vendor agnostic way (ie. also for Linode, Joyent, Telefonica - Digital Ocean and Rackspace coming soon, and support for standalone servers in Hetzner, or your private cloud, or even under your desk for example)
As well as just supporting your preferred vendor (based on price, location, guaranteed location, SLA etc) it means that we can offer you a way to switch between vendors if that vendor has some down-time, or doesn't meet your changing requirements as you move forward.
Also, we are really trying to be as application centric as possible - everything stems from your application code - and then provide the ongoing management tools you need on top of that (for easy scaling, backups, scheduled tasks, migrations, reporting etc)
Great feedback from everyone! We didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night!
