Section 13 - Elastic Beanstalk

Question 1

What is Elastic Beanstalk?

Answer 1

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services.

• Supported Languages
  
  • Java, .Net, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker
• Supported Platforms
  
  • Apache http server, Tomcat, Nginx, Passenger and IIS
• Infrastructure
  
  • Provisioning infrastructure, load balancing, autoscaling, and application health monitoring
• Application platform
  
  • Installation and management of the application stack, including patching and updates to your Operating System and application platfrom.
• NO additional charges for using Elastic Beanstalk, you are only charged for the resources deployed.

Question 2

Elastic Beanstalk deployment options?

Answer 2

• All at once
  
  • Deployes to all hosts concurrently
• Rolling
  
  • Deployes the new version in batches
• Rolling with Additional Batch
  
  • Launches an additional batch of instances. then deploys the new version in batches.
• Immutable
  
  • Deploys the new version to a fresh group of instances before deleting the old instances.
• Traffic Splitting
  
  • Installs the new version on a new set of instances, like an immutable deployment.
  • Fowards a percentage of incoming client traffic to the new application version for evaluation.

Question 3

Elastic Beanstalk “All at Once Deployment”?

Answer 3

• Deploys to all instances simultaneously.
• You will expereince a total outage.
• Not ideal for mission-critical production systems.
• Use case Scenario:
  
  • Development or Test environment

Question 4

Elastic Beanstalk “Rolling”?

Answer 4

• Deploys the new version in batches
• Each batch is taken out of service while the deployment takes place.
• Your environment capacity will be reduced by the number of instances in a batch while the deployment takes place.
• Not ideal for performance sensitive systems.
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Question 5

Elastic Beanstalk “Rolling with Additional Batch”?

Answer 5

• Create new batches to handle the deployment
• If the update fails, you need to perform an additional rolling update to roll back the changes.

Question 6

Elastic Beanstalk “Immutable Deployments”?

Answer 6

• Deploys the new version to a fresh group of instances.
• Only when the new instances pass their health checks, should the old instances be terminated.
• if a deployment fails, just delete the new instances.

Question 7

Elastic Beanstalk “Traffic Splitting”?

Answer 7

• Similar to immutabe deployment
• Enables canary testing.
• Installs the new version on a new set of instances just like an Immutable deployment
• Forwards a percentage of incoming client traffic to the new application version for a specified evaluation period.
• e.g. Send 90% of Traffic to Version 1, send 10% of Traffic to Version 2

Question 8

Elastic Beanstalk customizing your Environment?

Answer 8

• You can customize your Elastic BeanStalk environment using Elastic Beanstalk configuration files.
• Configuration
  
  • Define packages to install, create Linux users and groups, run shell commands, enable services, load balancer configuration
• YAML or JSON
  
  • These are files written in YAML or JSON format.
• Constraints
  
  • The file must have .config extension and be inside a folder called .ebextensions
  • The .ebextensions folder must be included in the top-level directory of your application source code bundle.

Question 9

Integrating RDS with Elastic Beanstalk?

Answer 9

• Elastic Beanstalk supports two ways of integrating RDS database with your Beanstalk environment
• You can deploy RDS inside your Elastic Beanstalk environment , or outside of it.
• Option 1: (Inside the Elastic Beanstalk)
  
  • Launch the RDS instance from within the Elastic Beanstalk console
  • If you terminate the environment, the database will also be terminated.
  • It is a good option for Dev and Test deployments, not so good for Prod.
• Option 2: (RDS instance outside of Elastic Beanstalk)
  
  • You can destory your Elastic Beanstalk enviroment wihtout affecting the database instance.
  • Prefferred for production
  • Connection to an Outside Database
    
    • Additional security group must be added to your environment’s Auto Scaling Group
    • You’ll need to provide connection string information to your application servers using Elastic Beanstalk environments properties.