[ernestipark]

I'm using Elastic Beanstalk with PHP and overall the experience has been fairly positive. I don't really have any ops experience, so I wanted something that could get me up and running quickly. There are some gotcha's, but it's been great. If you use git, there's a git CLI that deploys directly to Beanstalk which is very convenient. Deploying an environment or deploying a new instance of your code to an environment is really a piece of cake. You can set autoscale rules, interface with load balancers, add some other configs, etc. right from the beanstalk interface in just a few clicks. Support from Amazon has been solid, and the documentation/forums are not bad.

Fair warning, Beanstalk is still young so there might be some growing pains, but for someone with little ops experience, it's been pretty awesome. One very important fact to note, is that it's just a layer on top of other AWS services (with no extra fees, you only pay for the underlying resources), so if there's something you can't do on beanstalk, you can do it with whatever resources are beneath it (EC2, RDS, Cloudwatch, etc).

I'd recommend if you're interested in it, or feel AWS is burdensome/complicated, it's worth a try. You have to scope out if it's right for you or your project.