Amazon has just added support for Python applications to their Elastic Beanstalk service.
For those who haven’t heard of it before, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk is Amazon’s answer to Google AppEngine.
Google and Amazon initially had very different approaches to cloud hosting. Amazon gives you can API to load a standard application on a virtual machine and then launch as many instances as you want. Google’s approach is that you write an application directly for Google’s AppEngine APIs and then AppEngine manages the scaling for you.
Amazon launched a similar service called Elastic Beanstalk that did things the Google AppEngine way. Google has since launched Google Compute Engine, which is equivalent to Amazon’s EC2 offering, so both providers have similar solutions.
Google AppEngine currently supports only Java and Python, with experimental support for Google’s self-developed Go language. With the new support for Python added to Amazon Elastic Beanstalk it now supports .NET, PHP, Python, and Java.
The new Python support also includes an integration with Amazon RDS which provides MySQL instances for web applications. The Python support in Elastic Beanstalk includes support for automatically installing dependencies from a requirements.txt file, and setting up the environment via a simple declarative text file.
Amazon has already posted instructions for getting popular Python frameworks such as Django and Flask up and running on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.
