Elastic Beanstalk Cheat Sheet

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