AWS Elastic Beanstalk Components
- Application: Elastic Beanstalk directly takes in our project code. So Elastic Beanstalk application is named the same as your project home directory.
- Application Environments: Users may want their application to run on different environments like DEV, UAT, and PROD. You can create and configure different environments to run applications on different stages.
- Environment Health: One of the most lucrative features of running applications on AWS or most of the other cloud platforms is automated health checks. AWS runs automatic health checks on all EC-2 deployments (Elastic Beanstalk is a managed EC-2 service) which can be monitored from the AWS console. For example, in the case of web applications AWS will regularly, as scheduled by the developers, ping the application to check if the response is status code 200 and if the application is running as expected. Health check responses:
- Red: The application failed all health tests.
- Yellow: The application failed some of the health tests.
- Grey: The application is updating.
- Green: The application passed the health check successfully.
- Isolated: All environments within a single application are isolated from each other (independent of each others’ running states). Needless to say, two different applications are also isolated.
- Scalability: Using Auto-Scaling within Elastic Beanstalk makes the application dynamically scalable.
- Elastic Load Balancing: All the web requests to the application are not directly relayed to application instances. They first hit the Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), which, as the name suggests, balances the load across all the application instances.
- Language support: Elastic Beanstalk supports the applications developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.
- Pricing: There is no extra charge for using Elastic Beanstalk. Users are only required to pay for the services and resources provisioned by Elastic Beanstalk Service.
- Automatic Provisioning: Elastic Beanstalk takes away the burden of choosing the right services and configuring their security groups to work together.
- Impossible to Outgrow: AWS claims that since Elastic Beanstalk uses the Auto Scaling feature it can, in theory, handle any amount of internet traffic.
Introduction to AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an AWS-managed service for web applications. Elastic Beanstalk is a pre-configured EC2 server that can directly take up your application code and environment configurations and use it to automatically provision and deploy the required resources within AWS to run the web application. Unlike EC2 which is Infrastructure as a service, Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform As A Service (PAAS) as it allows users to directly use a pre-configured server for their application. Of course, you can deploy applications without ever having to use elastic beanstalk but that would mean having to choose the appropriate service from the vast array of services offered by AWS, manually provisioning these AWS resources, and stitching them up together to form a complete web application. Elastic Beanstalk abstracts the underlying configuration work and allows you as a user to focus on more pressing matters.
This raises a concern that if elastic Beanstalk configures most of the resources itself and abstracts the underlying details. Can developers change the configuration if needed? The answer is Yes. Elastic Beanstalk is provided to make application deployment simpler but at no level will it restrict the developers from changing any configurations.
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