Today Amazon Web Services announced support for PHP on its Elastic Beanstalk platform, and for Git based deployments.

AWS isn’t positioning Elastic Beanstalk as a PaaS, but its description sure makes it sound like one: “AWS Elastic Beanstalk makes it easy for you to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles all of the details associated with deployment including provisioning of EC2 instances, load balancing, auto scaling, and application health monitoring.” Now that it has support for Git based deployments, it sounds more like a PaaS than ever.

But what might set this apart from the dozens of other PaaS providers already out there – including PHPFog, Zend’s PHP Cloud and Engine Yard’s Orchestra – is the ability to more deeply customize the stack. AWS automates the deployment of the virtual infrastructure, but developers still have the ability to tweak to their heart’s delight. This points to a future where infrastructure-as-a-service providers offer highly customizable PaaS solutions. Joyent already has a Node.js PaaS, but watch for it and other IaaS providers to offer more configurable platforms in the future.

The downside of Elastic Beanstalk will remain AWS’ relatively expensive (even as it drops prices for its core services) and less involved technical support. AWS continues to leave a lot desired for support, and that’s where PaaSes that run on its infrastructure, or IaaS competitors like Joyent and Rackspace come in.

When the arms race for better technical features and the race to the bottom for pricing both slow down, what’s left? Support. We’ve been seeing certain vendors like HP double down on support services in other markets. Support will likely to be the big differentiator in a few years time.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services continues to grow like crazy despite increased competition from telcos, outages, criticism of its technical support and lack of enterprise-readiness. It may already be a billion dollar business. It’s hard to argue with those numbers, but AWS is hardly the only game in town.