This is cool, but not earth shattering. It is essentially a management stack/abstraction layer/deployment tool on top of existing AWS services: EC2, CloudWatch, load balancing, route 53, autoscaling, AMIs. It is a PaaS sort of... but single-tenant and not in the same sense as a multi-tenant, higher level PaaS like AppEngine or Heroku. Elastic Beanstalk gives you flexibility (full root access - do whatever you want), but with that comes more responsibility from a management perspective, and more opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot.