AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Question 1

What is Elastic Beanstalk?

Answer 1

Simplifies deploying, managing, and scaling web applications.

Question 2

What are the Elastic Beanstalk components?

Answer 2

Application, Application version, & Environment.

Question 3

What is the Application component?

Answer 3

Collection of Elastic Beanstalk components (environments, versions, configurations, …)

Question 4

What is the Application Version?

Answer 4

An iteration of your application code

Question 5

What is the Environment component?

Answer 5

Collection of AWS resources running an application version (only one application
version at a time)

Question 6

What are the two tiers for the Environment component?

Answer 6

Web Server Environment Tier & Worker Environment Tier

Question 7

Features:
- Utilizes a load balancer to direct traffic.
- Employs an auto-scaling group with multiple EC2 instances functioning as web servers.
- This setup is referred to as “architecture number one with Beanstalk.”
- Scale based on the number of SQS messages
- Can push messages to SQS queue from anotherWeb ServerTier

Answer 7

Traditional Web Tier Architecture

Question 8

What is the Integration of Web and Worker Environments?

Answer 8

The web environment can push messages into the SQS queue used by the worker environment, linking both systems effectively.

Question 9

Features:
- Does not have direct client access to EC2 instances.
- Utilizes an SQS (Simple Queue Service) queue to hold incoming messages.
- EC2 instances act as workers, pulling and processing messages from the SQS queue.
- Scales based on the number of messages in the SQS queue; more messages trigger more EC2 instances.
- Referred to as “architecture number two with Beanstalk.”

Answer 9

Beanstalk Worker Environment

Question 10

What are the two deployment modes?

Answer 10

1. Single Instance Deployment
2. High Availability Deployment

Question 11

Features:
- Suitable for development purposes.
- Consists of a single EC2 instance with an Elastic IP.
- May include additional resources like an RDS database.
- Offers a straightforward setup for simpler, non-scalable applications.

Answer 11

Single Instance Deployment

Question 12

Features:
- Ideal for production environments.
- Utilizes a load balancer to distribute traffic across multiple EC2 instances.
- Includes an auto-scaling group to manage the scaling of instances across multiple Availability Zones.
- Often features an RDS database configured for multi-AZ deployments to ensure high availability and failover support.

Answer 12

High Availability Deployment

Question 13

What are Beanstalk Deployment Options?

Answer 13

• All at once
• Rolling
• Rolling with additional batches
• Immutable
• Blue Green
• Traffic Splitting

Question 14

What is All at once deployment?

Answer 14

(deploy all in one go) – fastest, but instances aren’t available to serve traffic for a bit (downtime)

Question 15

What is “Rolling” deployment?

Answer 15

Update a few instances at a time (bucket), and then move onto the next bucket once the first bucket is healthy

Question 16

What is “Rolling with additional batches” deployment?

Answer 16

Like rolling, but spins up new instances to move the batch (so that the old application is still available)

Question 17

What is “Immutable” deployment?

Answer 17

Spins up new instances in a new ASG, deploys version to these instances, and then swaps all the instances when everything is healthy

Question 18

What is “Blue Green” deployment?

Answer 18

Create a new environment and switch over when ready

Question 19

What is “Traffic Splitting” deployment?

Answer 19

Canary testing – send a small % of traffic to new deployment

Question 20

Features:
- Fastest deployment
- Application has downtime
- Great for quick iterations in development environment
- No additional cost

Answer 20

All at once

Question 21

Features:
- Application is running at capacity
- Can set the bucket size
- Application is running both versions simultaneously
- Small additional cost
- Additional batch is removed at the end of the deployment
- Longer deployment
- Good for prod

Answer 21

Rolling with additional batches

Question 22

Features:
- Application is running below capacity
- Can set the bucket size
- Application is running both versions simultaneously
- No additional cost
- Long deployment

Answer 22

Rolling

Question 23

Features:
- Zero downtime
- New Code is deployed to new instances on a temporary ASG
- High cost, double capacity
- Longest deployment
- Quick rollback in case of failures (just terminate new ASG)
- Great for prod

Answer 23

Immutable

Question 24

Features:
- Not a “direct feature” of Elastic Beanstalk
- Zero downtime and release facility
- Create a new “stage” environment and deploy v2 there
- The new environment (green) can be validated independently and roll back if issues
- Route 53 can be setup using weighted policies to redirect a little bit of traffic to the stage environment
- Using Beanstalk, “swap URLs” when done with the environment test

Answer 24

Blue / Green

Question 25

Features:
- Canary Testing
- New application version is deployed to a temporary ASG with the same capacity
- A small % of traffic is sent to the temporary ASG for a configurable amount of time
- Deployment health is monitored
- If there’s a deployment failure, this triggers an automated rollback (very quick)
- No application downtime
- New instances are migrated from the temporary to the original ASG
- Old application version is then terminated

Answer 25

Traffic Splitting

Question 26

What does Elastic Beanstalk rely on under the hood?

Answer 26

CouldFormation

Question 27

What is CloudFormation used for?

Answer 27

To provision AWS services

Question 28

What is Elastic Beanstalk Cloning?

Answer 28

Clone an environment with the exact same configuration

Question 29

All….. and …… are preserved when you clone and enviornment.

Answer 29

resources, configurations

Question 31

What does Elastic Beanstalk do?

Answer 31

Automatically handles infrastructure tasks like provisioning, load balancing, and scaling.