Posted On: Dec 11, 2013
We are excited to announce Worker Tiers - Elastic Beanstalk environments optimized to process application background tasks at scale. For example, if you have an application that sends confirmation e-mails, you can now simply enqueue a task to later send the e-mail in the background while your application code immediately renders the rest of the webpage. A Worker Tier in your environment will later pick up the task and send the e-mail in the background. Worker Tiers complement the familiar existing Web Tiers and are ideal to run time consuming tasks such as lengthy reports, database cleanup tasks, etc.
You can develop worker-code like any other web-application using PHP, Python, Ruby, Java or Node.js. A worker is simply another HTTP request handler that Beanstalk invokes with messages buffered using Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). Messages put in the queue are forwarded via HTTP POST to a configurable URL on the local host. Elastic Beanstalk takes care of creating and managing the queue if one isn't provided. You can create a single instance or an auto-scaled, load balanced Worker Tier that will scale based on the work load. Worker Tiers let you focus on developing code to process work without learning any new API or worrying about servers. For detailed information, see Environment Tiers.
Also, Elastic Beanstalk now supports Amazon RDS PostgreSQL. Starting today, you can launch an Elastic Beanstalk web or worker tier environment with an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL data tier.
To learn more about Elastic Beanstalk, visit the Elastic Beanstalk detail page, documentation, and watch this introductory video. To get started now, go to the Elastic Beanstalk Console and create an environment.