This week, Amazon Web Services announced two significant enhancements to its PaaS platform Elastic Beanstalk in the form of support for Ruby and Virtual Private Clouds. Elastic Beanstalk now supports application development in Ruby in addition to Java, PHP, Python and .NET. Ruby applications are run on the Phusion Passenger application server, which enables users to develop and test code and subsequently deploy applications to the Elastic Beanstalk platform. In addition to supporting Ruby, Elastic Beanstalk now supports integration with Virtual Private Clouds, allowing customers to run an intranet atop the Elastic Beanstalk infrastructure.
Separate from the enhancements to Elastic Beanstalk, AWS declared a doubling of the maximum Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) per EBS volume from 1000 to 2000. The new upper bound of 2000 IOPS per EBS volume represents “an order of magnitude more IOPS than you can expect from a high-end 15,000 RPM disk drive.” The increase in the maximum IOPS per EBS volume means that customers may be able to RAID together fewer EBS volumes to achieve the desired increase in performance. Based on comments by AWS CTO Werner Vogels at Structure Europe, customers should expect to see more enhancements to the AWS platform in general, and Elastic Beanstalk in particular, as AWS fends off competition from Microsoft Azure and the emerging constellation of private PaaS vendors.
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