Amazon, Rackspace Add New Cloud Capabilities 45
miller60 writes "Amazon Web Services has rolled out Elastic Beanstalk, a free feature which automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. AWS execs tell GigaOm that Beanstalk represents a move up to Platform-as-a-Service and is designed 'to address the idea of vendor lock-in and inflexibility that commonly afflicts other platforms for application development.' Meanwhile, Amazon rival Rackspace Hosting has extended its cloud platform to its European data centers, opening the service to customers bound by data protection regulations, and says it now has more than 100,000 cloud customers."
So, in other words (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So, in other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon claims that a feature that only they offer helps prevent vendor lock-in?!?
No:
Today's release of Elastic Beanstalk is built for Java developers using the familiar Apache Tomcat software stack, which ensures easy portability if you ever want to move your applications. Elastic Beanstalk is designed so that it can be extended to support multiple development stacks and programming languages in the future.
Compare this to, say, writing an app using AppEngine and the lack of lock-in becomes clearer.