AWS Crash Course - Elastic Beanstalk

Welcome back to AWS Crash Course.
In the last section we discussed about EBS.
In this section we will discuss about AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk makes it even easier for developers to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. Developers simply upload their application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

• You can push updates from GIT and only the modified files are transmitted to AWS elastic beanstalk.
• Elastic beanstalk supports IAM, EC2, VPC and RDS instances.
• You have full access to the resources under elastic beanstalk
• Code is stored in S3
• Multiple environments are allowed to support version control. You can roll back changes.
• Amazon Linux AMI and Windows 2008 R2 supported.
  

  What are the supported Languages and Development Stacks?

• Apache Tomcat for Java applications
• Apache HTTP Server for PHP applications
• Apache HTTP Server for Python applications
• Nginx or Apache HTTP Server for Node.js applications
• Passenger or Puma for Ruby applications
• Microsoft IIS 7.5, 8.0, and 8.5 for .NET applications
• Java SE
• Docker
• Go

How can you update Elastic Beanstalk?

• You can upload the code for updating on AWS elastic beanstalk
• It support multiple running environments like test, pre-prod and prod etc
• Each environment is independently configured and runs on its own separate AWS resources
• Elastic beanstalk also stores and tracks application versions over time so an existing environment can easily rolled back to a prior version.
• New environment can be launched using an older version to try and reproduce a customer problem.

Fault Tolerance

• Always design, implement, and deploy for automated recovery from failure
• Use multiple Availability Zones for your Amazon EC2 instances and for Amazon RDS
• Use ELB for balancing the load.
• Configure your Auto Scaling settings to maintain your fleet of Amazon EC2 instances.
• If you are using Amazon RDS, then set the retention period for backups, so that Amazon RDS can perform automated backups.

  What about Security?

• Security on AWS is a shared responsibility
• You are responsible for the security of data coming in and out of your Elastic Beanstalk environment.
• Configure SSL to protect information from your clients.
• Configure security groups and NACL with least privilege.

This short course was to give you an understanding of elastic beanstalk. If you want to try some hands on follow this AWS tutorial.