title: What is the difference for the PHP app running on the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk or the general instances or servers?
body: <p>My question is: What is the exactly difference for the PHP app running on the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk (called EB after.)or the general instances or servers?</p>
  
  <p>I am new to Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, I used to try PagodaBox.com. Is the a PaaS platform EB exactly same as PagodaBox.com?</p>
  
  <p>What's the difference of the runtime environment between the app running on the general servers or a PaaS auto-scale platform just like EB?</p>
  
  <p>I may have figure out some. I do a test both on the EB and PagodaBox.com, the PagodaBox told me they are the destination, so you have to configure your app on the local, in fact, they do not support the write operation that out of the Share Dir which has defined in Boxfile.</p>
  
  <p>So, is that correct? and same as EB that the PaaS platform will be a quite different than the general servers which hosted your website?</p>
  
  <p>When you are installing a website like wordpress on the general single server, you can config and edit the file on the server-side, your every change will affected your source-code or resource files which's a part of your code. But if you are using a PaaS like pagoda, you can't even do a write operation out of the Shared Dir, that means you have to do the all at local then upload them as static code. all user data will be stored into mysql database as the same way in the general server, but all uploads should stored to a Shared Dir that defined to the Boxfile. but where should it be in EB? How we store the uploaded files if we are going to deploy a wordpress based site in EB? Is it going to be changing the code or we must find a own way to store a reside-data since we are coding our own app?</p>
  
  <p>How many difference when you are designing the app running on the general server or a EB platform? the question might be: what's the difference when your app running a distributed environment?</p>
  
  <p>Sorry, I don't speak English as well as Chinese. But I am looking for your answers, thanks!</p>