Setting up a one-click Amazon Elastic Beanstalk environment is faster and simpler than setting up a custom Linux EC2 environment, and automatically provides you with capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Step 1: Set up an account: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide

A few things that the Amazon Getting Started Guide leaves out include:

Step 2: Set up Eclipse JEE version for local testing.

To test on your local machine as you develop your application using Jetty:

  1. Create or import a project.
  2. Select the project in the Project Explorer.
  3. Click Run > Run As > Run on Server.
  4. Select Basic > J2EE Preview.
  5. Click Finish.

Step 3: Set up Eclipse JEE version for one-click EC2 deployment.

To upload and deploy your application on EC2:

  1. Install the AWS EC2 Eclipse plug-in: http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse/#4
  2. If you have not already, register your AWS account for AWS Elastic Beanstalk (see http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/#pricing for how using beanstalk will affect your costs)
  3. Define a new AWS Elastic Beanstalk web application (see the "Hello World" section in http://blog.teamextension.com/getting-started-with-aws-elastic-beanstalk-179)

Note: Stopping an EC2 instance created by Elastic Beanstalk will cause a new EC2 instance to be started; you must stop the Beanstalk application from the Servers tab.