AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Elastic Beanstalk is a platform layer that takes application code and assembles the AWS runtime environment around it. It lets a team focus more on application versions and settings than on wiring the underlying infrastructure.
▶Architecture Diagram
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Even for one ordinary web application, repeatedly wiring EC2, load balancing, autoscaling, and logs by hand is repetitive. When you cannot get the platform basics quickly, the deployment frame starts taking more effort than the application code.
Many teams repeatedly configured identical EC2 stacks to deploy standard web apps. To reduce this repetition, Beanstalk emerged as an app-centric abstraction of AWS resource combinations.
Elastic Beanstalk takes application code and creates EC2, ELB, Auto Scaling, and CloudWatch configurations on your behalf. Teams focus on application version deployment instead of platform details.
Elastic Beanstalk and ECS are both application execution platforms, but at different abstraction levels. Beanstalk is closer to a traditional web app platform, while ECS is closer to container-level orchestration. If you want to push code and get a web app platform quickly, look at Beanstalk; if you want fine-grained control over container deployment and service operations, look at ECS.
Well-suited for traditional web framework apps, rapid prototypes, and teams that want to focus on code deployment over infrastructure. Not a good fit when container deployment standardization or fine-grained infrastructure control is needed.