Creating and deploying Java applications on Elastic Beanstalk - Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
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Creating and deploying Java applications on Elastic Beanstalk

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk supports two platforms for Java applications.

  • Tomcat – A platform based on Apache Tomcat, an open source web container for applications that use Java servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSPs) to serve HTTP requests. Tomcat facilitates web application development by providing multithreading, declarative security configuration, and extensive customization. Elastic Beanstalk has platform branches for each of Tomcat's current major versions. For more information, see The Tomcat platform.

  • Java SE – A platform for applications that don't use a web container, or use one other than Tomcat, such as Jetty or GlassFish. You can include any library Java Archives (JARs) used by your application in the source bundle that you deploy to Elastic Beanstalk. For more information, see The Java SE platform.

Recent branches of both the Tomcat and Java SE platforms are based on Amazon Linux 2, and use Corretto—the Amazon Java SE distribution. Names of these branches in the platform lists include the word Corretto instead of Java, for example, Corretto 11 with Tomcat 8.5.

For a list of current platform versions, see Tomcat and Java SE in the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk Platforms guide.

Amazon provides several tools for working with Java and Elastic Beanstalk. Regardless of the platform branch that you choose, you can use the Amazon SDK for Java to use other Amazon services from within your Java application. The Amazon SDK for Java is a set of libraries that allow you to use Amazon APIs from your application code without writing the raw HTTP calls from scratch.

If you use the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) to develop your Java application, you can also get the Amazon Toolkit for Eclipse. The Amazon Toolkit for Eclipse is an open source plug-in that lets you manage Amazon resources, including Elastic Beanstalk applications and environments, from within the Eclipse IDE.

If the command line is more your style, install the Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (EB CLI) and use it to create, monitor, and manage your Elastic Beanstalk environments from the command line. If you run multiple environments for your application, the EB CLI integrates with Git to let you associate each of your environments with a different Git branch.

The topics in this chapter assume that you have some knowledge of Elastic Beanstalk environments. If you haven't used Elastic Beanstalk before, try the getting started tutorial to learn the basics.

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