If you are a Ruby developer and were looking into Amazon Web Services for hosting, they may just have some good news for you.
After adding support for Python recently, Amazon has now added support for running Ruby applications on their Elastic Beanstalk platform. This now brings the list of supported runtimes to .NET, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby.
Amazon’s EC2 service could always be used to run Ruby-based applications, but now Ruby developers can take advantage of the features their Elastic Beanstalk platform provides. Elastic Beanstalk uses Amazon EC2 for running the application, but automatically handles a lot of the deployment tasks for you such as load balancing, scaling, and provisioning.
While with EC2 a one has to manage launching instances, scaling with load changes, and updating code across instances, with Elastic Beanstalk all one has to do is define an environment of the runtime of your choice, and it will automatically utilise the required AWS services to deploy your application. You can then push code to your Elastic Beanstalk environment using Git, and it will handle the deployment and updating of you code across instances.
With support for Ruby comes the ability to run applications developed using popular web development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Sinatra—walkthroughs for both have been posted on Amazon’s website.
Another feature added to Elastic Beanstalk is the ability to run those applications in a virtual private cloud. Amazon’s VPC service allows using Amazon services within a private cloud with private IP ranges, and private data. It can also be bridged to a local business network via an encrypted VPN connection.
You can find out more about the new features one Amazon’s blog.
