Beanstalk Cheat Sheet

• PaaS, or managed application environments

Deployment Policies

• 5 policies 🎓
  • All at once = deploy to all instances at once, loses all capacity during deployment
  • Rolling = take a batch of instances out of service, deploy and put them back, repeat until all instances are updated, loses a batch of capacity during deployment
  • Rolling with additional batch = create an extra batch and do rolling deployments, do not lose capacity during deployment
  • Immutable = deploy to a fresh group of instances, do not lose capacity during deployment, traffic is shifted after deployment
  • Traffic splitting = deploy to a fresh group of instances, shift a percentage of traffic to new instances, when everything goes well, shift all traffic
    • aka. Canary testing
• vs. Configuration changes
  • When you change resource configuration (instance type, key pair, environment variables etc.), new instances needs to be provisioned
  • Otherwise configurations may get applied directly to instances
  • 2 options
    • Rolling = similar to “Rolling with additional batch” deployment, but this time it’s about instances not the application on it
    • Immutable = this is the mechanism used by “Immutable” deployment
      • Cannot change resource and deploy application in one go, must be done separately
      • Use blue/green instead

Blue/Green Deployment

• Create an entirely new environment with new application, then use CNAME to switch to new environment instantly
  • This is the definition of blue/green deployment in the context of Beanstalk, otherwise an Immutable deployment could be called Blue/Green as well

Saved Configurations

• Environment configurations can be saved to S3
• Use cases 🎓
  • Create new environment
  • Replicate an environment with adjustments, e.g. prod environment is the same as dev but with different instance size
  • Apply to running environment
• Note: with Beanstalk you DO NOT
  • Directly manipulate the underlying CloudFormation template / stack
  • Directly manipulate Beanstalk managed resources

.ebextensions

• A folder within your source code root folder to set and change configurations when you deploy your code
• Configuration files in .ebextensions folder use *.config filenames and in YAML or JSON format
• Can include
  • Commands to run during instance boot, similar to running user scripts
  • Download and create files on instances
  • Add dependencies needed by your application
  • Override default Beanstalk settings
  • Adding and customizing Beanstalk resources (auto scaling, load balancer, etc.)
• Linux and Windows server have different options

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