Can AWS Elastic Beanstalk improve your life? Some applications are built with truly great code and should be used and appreciated by as many people as possible. But their developers simply haven’t the time or skills to handle the many complicated networking and security details themselves.
It is for just such scenarios that managed deployment services like Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk exist. With Beanstalk automatically managing your infrastructure for you, you do lose some of the fine control over your application environment but, in many cases, it’s a reasonable trade-off for the simplicity you get.
Whether you’ve written your app in Python, Ruby, Java, Node.js, Go, or PHP, Elastic Beanstalk only requires you to set the appropriate platform (including an operating system and platform version) from a pull-down menu, upload your application, and run it. AWS will take care of all the details – including compute, networking, autoscaling, load balancing, and monitoring – invisibly.
Elastic Beanstalk Hands-on Lab
As simple as Elastic Beanstalk really is, getting used to handling multiple versions of your application or just visualizing the whole process can take some time. For this reason, Cloud Academy has created a hands-on lab – Deploy a PHP application using Elastic Beanstalk – that will guide you through the process of deploying and updating a PHP application.
Lab author Ryan S. Brown has put together this guided experience of a real-world deployment using Elastic Beanstalk. You will deploy a sample PHP application through the actual interface, tour the dashboard console, upload and deploy an updated version of your application, and then, finally, clean up the resources you’ve created.
