Amazon Web Services' Elastic Beanstalk for .Net applications now supports configuration files to simplify cloud setup and integration with Amazon's private cloud and relational database.
This year has seen Amazon Web Services (AWS) increasingly focus on making its cloud easier to manage and continuing to develop Elastic Beanstalk is part of that strategy.
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With Elastic Beanstalk, which is still in beta, an administrator can deploy and manage applications in Amazon's cloud without having to configure the infrastructure that runs those applications. Elastic Beanstalk allows developers to upload an application and it then automates the deployment details, so administrators no longer have to care about tasks such as provisioning virtual servers, setting up load balancing or managing scaling, according to Amazon.
Elastic Beanstalk for .Net allows companies to run and manage their .Net applications on Amazon's cloud using Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012.
Using configuration files, IT staff can set up software on Amazon's virtual servers without having to create a custom AMI (Amazon Machine Image), which normally is used to create a virtual machine within Amazon's cloud.
Thanks to the integration with Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud, administrators can set up their own virtual network and then use Elastic Beanstalk to run .Net applications inside this logically isolated section, Amazon said.
If an application relies on a relational database, it is now possible to configure an Amazon RDS database instance for use with an Elastic Beanstalk .Net application. Using the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio or the AWS Management Console, a developer can add the instance with a few clicks, according to Amazon.
There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk; users pay for the cloud resources needed to store and run their applications.
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