Elastic Beanstalk simplifies deploying and managing applications in the AWS Cloud without needing to worry about the infrastructure that runs those applications. It automatically handles the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring for your uploaded application.  It is free to use, however the services it deploys to run your application are charged as if you we're using them individually.

An Elastic Beanstalk application is a collection of components and is conceptually similar to a folder.

Persistent storage

The EC2 instance(s) created by Elastic Beanstalk to run your application don't have persistent storage, as they are started up they will have default files and as they are released their local data is lost.  You have the following options to store your persistent data:

S3 (Simple Storage Service)

EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Store)

DynamoDB

RDS (Relational Database Service)