Devguides

Elastic Beanstalk Cheat Sheet

Devguides -

This cheat sheet is based on the AWS Certified Developer Associate walk through by Andrew Brown. Originally I wrote down the cheat sheet from his presentation. However, I thought maybe others might have a use for the same cheat sheet in a searchable format. I really encourage you to watch his walk through over at YouTube.

  • Elastic beanstalk handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring
  • When you want to run a web-application but you don't want to have to think about the underlying infrastructure
  • It costs nothing to use Elastic Beanstalk (only the resources it provisions. Eg. RDS, ELB and EC2)
  • Recommended for test or development apps. Not recommended for production use
  • You can choose from the following preconfigured platforms: Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go and Docker
  • You can run containers on EB either in Single-container or Multi-container, these containers are running on ECS instead of EC2
  • You can launch either a Web Environment or a Worker Environment
  • Web Enivorments come in two types Single-Instance or Load Balanced
  • Single-Instance Env launches a single EC2 instance, an EIP is assigned to the EC2
  • Load Balanced Env launch EC2s behind an ELB managed by an ASG
  • Worker Environments creates an SQS queue, installs the SQS daemon on the EC2 instances, and has ASG scaling policy which will add or remove instances based on queue size
  • EB has the following Deployment Policies:
  • All at once - takes all servers out-of-service, applies changes, puts servers back-in-service. Fast, but has downtime
  • Rolling - updates servers in batches, reduced capacity based on batch size
  • Rolling with additional batch - adds new servers in batches to replace old, never reduces capacity
  • Immutable - creates the same amount of servers, and switches all at once to new servers, removing old servers
  • Rollback deployment policies require an ELB, so cannot be used with Single-Instance Web Environments
  • In-Place deployment is when deployment occurs within the environment, all deployment policies are In-Place
  • Blue/Green is when deployment swaps environments (outside an environment). When you have external resources such as RDS which cannot be destroyed its suited for blue/green
  • .ebextensions is a folder which contains all configuration files
  • With EB you can provide a Custom Image which can improve provisioning times
  • If you let Elastic Beanstalk create the RDS instance, that means when you delete your environment it will delete the database. This setup is intended for development and test environments
  • Dockerrun.aws.json is similar to a ECS Task Definition, and is used to define multi container configurations

Credits

Andrew Brown from ExamPro