It is recommended to develop web applications locally and deploy the final application to the cloud, although it is possible to develop web applications directly on cloud-based servers. Developing applications locally has the following advantages:
However, to locally develop applications that you will later deploy to the cloud, your local environment must mirror the environment on the cloud. For the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, this means you must use a Tomcat 6 or Tomcat 7 server to match your Elastic Beanstalk application environment.
When your local environment is set up, develop web applications as usual. When the application is complete, deploy it to the cloud environment.