Elastic Beanstalk

Question 1

Elastic Beanstalk

Answer 1

• Uses all components such as EC2, ASG, ELB, RDS
• Managed service with instance configuration
• deployment strategy is configurable but performed by Elastic Beanstalk
• the developer is responsible for the only the code.

Question 2

Elastic Beanstalk

3 Architecture Model

Answer 2

• single instance deployment; good for development
• LB + ASG great for production or pre-production ; web applications
• ASG only; great for non-web apps in production (workers)

Question 3

Elastic Beanstalk

Deployment modes for Updates

Answer 3

• All-at-once
• Rolling
• Rolling with additional Batch
• Immutable

Question 4

Elastic Beanstalk

Deployment Mode: All-at-Once

Answer 4

‣ Deploy the new to all instances all at once
‣ Fastest, but instances aren’t available to serve traffic
‣ No additional costs
‣ Yes Downtime

Question 5

Elastic Beanstalk

Deployment Mode: Rolling

Answer 5

‣ Deploy new version in batches
‣ Application is running below capacity 
‣ Update a few instances at a time (bucket), and then move onto the next bucket once the first bucket is healthy
‣ No additional costs
‣ Long deployments 
‣ NO downtime

Question 6

Elastic Beanstalk

Rolling with additional Batch

Answer 6

‣ Deploy new version in batches but first launch new batch of instances
‣ Like rolling but spines up new instances to move the batch (so that the old application is still available)
‣ Application is running at capacity
‣ Application is running both version simultaneously
‣ Additional batch is removed at the end of the deployment
‣ Longer deployment
‣ Good for production
‣ NO downtime

Question 7

Elastic Beanstalk

Deployment Mode: Immutable

Answer 7

‣ Deploy new version to a fresh group
‣ Spins up new instances in a new ASG, deploys version to these instances and then swaps all the instances when everything is healthy
‣ Zero downtime 
‣ High cost, double the capacity 
‣ Longest deployment 
‣ Quick rollback in case of failures; just terminate the new ASG
‣ Great for production  
‣ NO downtime

Question 8

Beanstalk Lifecycle Policy

Answer 8

• 1000 application version max
• if you don’t remove old ones new ones can’t be deployed
• to phase out old application version

Question 9

Elastic Beanstalk Extensions

Answer 9

• files must be in the .ebextensions/ directory in the root of the source code
• YAML / JSON format
• .config extensions
• able to modify some default extensions with option_settings
• resources managed by .ebextensions get deleted if the environment gets deleted.

Question 10

Beanstalk & CloudFormation

Answer 10

• under the hood Elastic Beanstalk uses CloudFormation

Question 11

Elastic Beanstalk Cloning

Answer 11

• clone an environment with the same exact configuration
• all resources and configurations are preserved
  
  • LB type and config
  • RDS DB type
  • Environment Variables
• after cloning you can change the settings