Here’s part two of my look at the big AWS announcement yesterday – full support for ASP.NET and SQL Server on AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS RDS.  I found it remarkably easy to get up and going with ASP.NET on AWS Elastic Beanstalk.  My short screencast shows me working first directly in the AWS administrative console (setting up a sample application).  Here I can monitor and configure my ASP.NET applications.

It’s important to understand that when you test this functionality, you are spinning up EC2 instances and so long as you leave them running, you will be charged for compute cycles.  As with any other EC2 instance, you can, of course, pause these instances to reduce costs if you are testing.  You will still be charged for storage, but that cost is so small (like $ 5.00 / month for the smallest-sized instances), that ‘pausing’ is a good strategy to test out the functionality at minimal cost.  When you are done, be sure to terminate the instances in the EC2 console.

In the second part of the screencast, I test out deploying an ASP.NET application from Visual Studio to AWS Elastic Beanstalk (and also deploying an upgrade).  I used the AWS Visual Studio toolkit to quickly complete the deployment and upgrade.  All-in-all, the process was simple and powerful.  I am really excited to explore more of this new functionality and will blog as I continue learning.

Enjoy the screencast too.