So far in this book, we have focused on the use of Elastic Container Service (ECS) and its variant, AWS Fargate, to manage and deploy Docker applications. The remainder of this book will focus on alternative technologies that you can use to run your Docker applications in AWS, and the first of these that we will cover is Elastic Beanstalk.
Elastic Beanstalk falls into a category that is commonly referred to by the industry as Platform as a service (PaaS), and is a service that is intended to provide a managed runtime environment for your applications that lets you focus on developing, deploying, and operating your application, rather than worry about the surrounding infrastructure. To reinforce this paradigm, Elastic Beanstalk is focused around supporting various popular programming languages and today includes support for Node.js, PHP, Python...
