Amazon today announced its Elastic Beanstalk to ease introducing new Java applications into the cloud.
Elastic Beanstalk enables very rapid provisioning of high-performance, load-balanced applications using Amazon Cloud services. It uses existing AWS services including EC2, S3, Simple Notification Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto-Scaling.
Initially, Beanstalk will support Java applications running on the Apache Tomcat application stack. But the product has been designed so that it can be extended to support "multiple development stacks and programming languages in the future".
Beanstalk is basically a template system that allows developers to select preconfigured instances to deploy applications into. Uploading an Java EAR file enables the instance and sets up the provisioning system.
Amazon has opted not to charge anything additional for the new system.
More info at the Elastic Beanstalk Site.