Question: what is the difference between elastic beanstalk and ec2?
Answer: Elastic Beanstalk. Elastic Beanstalk is one layer of abstraction away from the EC2 layer. Elastic Beanstalk will setup an "environment" for you that can contain a number of EC2 instances, an optional database, as well as a few other AWS components such as a Elastic Load Balancer, Auto-Scaling Group, Security Group.