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Elastic BeanStalk

Elastic Beanstalk

  • PaaS - Platform as a service
  • Developer Focused - not end user
  • Great for smaller development teams
  • High level - Managed Application Environment
  • User Provide code and EB handles the environment
  • Focus on code, low infrastructure overhead
  • Fully customisable - uses AWS products under the covers
  • Requires application changes .. does not come for free
  • Databases OUTSIDE of Elastic BeanStalk
  • DB in env are lost if env is deleted

EB - Platforms

  • Built-in languages
    • Go, java, java + tomcat, .NET Core(linux) & .NET (Windows)
    • nodejs, python, pho, ruby
  • Docker
    • single container docker
    • multi container docker (ECS behind the scene)
    • preconfigured docker for unsupported runtime (glassfish java8)
  • Cutom
    • use packer to create custom platform

EB - Application

  • Collection of things relating to an application
  • Versions of application is stored in S3 and sourcable (zip or war)
  • Environments
    • containers of infrastructure running a specific versions
    • each environment has it own CNAME
    • CNAME Swap to enable blue/green deployment
    • web server tier - usually service traffic from load balancers
    • worker tier - processing requests from queue like SQS

EB - Deployment Policies

  • All at once - deploy to all at once, brief outage
  • Rolling - deploy in rolling batches
  • Rolling with additional batch - as above, with new batch to maintain capacity during the process
    • 150 % of capacity depending on the configuration
    • both versions serving traffic at one point
  • Immutable - all new instances with new version
    • create another set of ASG
    • delete the old ASG
  • Traffic Splitting - fresh instances, with a traffic split (A/B testing)

EB and RDS

  • RDS provisioned with EB is associated with EB and will be deleted once EB environment is deleted.
  • Different data in different environment (different RDS)
  • environment properties: RDS_HOSTNAME, RDS_PORT, RDS_DB_NAME, RDS_USERNAME, RDS_PASSWORD
  • RDS provisioned outside EB should configure above properties as environemnt variables
  • Steps to decouple exsiting RDS
    • create snapshot of RDS
    • enable termination protection
    • create another EB environment with same verison without RDS
    • ensure the EB new environment can connect to RDS
    • make the CNAME switch from old to new environment
    • delete the old EB environment
    • clean up the failed cloudformation stack and retain the RDS created via CFN stack

EB customisation

EB & HTTPS

  • apply SSL cert to the load balancer directly via EB console
  • OR apply via .ebextensions/securelistener-[alb][nlb].config 
    option_settings:
aws:elbv2:listener:443:
    ListernerEnabled: 'true'
    Protocol: HTTPS
    SSLCertificateArns: arn:....

EB cloning

  • Clone an existing env to another
  • Update the new env once the cloning is complete
  • RDS data is not copied during cloning
  • Changes outside the EB will not be copied

EB and Docker

  • Single container application
    • Dockerfile
    • docker-compose
  • Mutiple container applications
    • ECS cluster
    • EC2 instances provisioned in the cluster and ELB for HA
    • Dockerrun.aws.json (V2) file in root of application source code
    • Docker image will have to be stored in docker registry like ECR