Amazon Web Services Gets Elastic Beanstalk Security, VPC Load Balancing

Cloud services juggernaut Amazon Web Services made a pair of under-the-radar announcements ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday: support for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk platform-as-a-service offering and the addition of elastic load balancing in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

By the numbers, as per the relevant Amazon Web Services blog entries:

1. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which in fairness Amazon describes less as PaaS and more of a cloud application deployment and management tool, gets integration with AWS IAM. The benefit: role-based permissions within Elastic Beanstalk. Developers can get the ability to create an application version and deploy it to production, but QA staff may get read-only access alone just to review code. Sounds handy.
2. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which offers customers and service providers dedicated data center infrastructure for their cloud platforms, gets elastic load balancing. According to the blog entry, that includes the full range of load balancing features, including “SSL termination, health checks, sticky sessions, and CloudWatch monitoring.” Load balancing on VPC doesn’t support IPv6 quite yet, but you can assign security groups and register instances without assigning a public IP address.