Resources referenced within this lecture:

Lab: Deploy a PHP Application using AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Lab: Run a controlled deploy with AWS Elastic Beanstalk

 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this lecture on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an AWS managed service that allows you to upload the code of your web application, along with the environment configurations, which will then allow Elastic Beanstalk to automatically provision and deploy the appropriate and necessary resources required within AWS to make the web application operational. These resources can include other AWS services and features, such as EC2, Auto Scaling, application health-monitoring, and Elastic Load Balancing, in addition to capacity provisioning. This automation and simplification makes it an ideal service for engineers who may not have the familiarity or the necessary skills within AWS to deploy, provision, monitor, and scale the correct environment themselves to run the developed applications. Instead, this responsibility is passed on to AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy the correct infrastructure to run the uploaded code. This provides a simple, effective, and quick solution to deploying your web application. 

Once the application is up and running, you can continue to support and maintain the environment as you would with a custom built environment. You can additionally perform some of the maintenance tasks from the Elastic Beanstalk dashboard itself. Elastic Beanstalk is able to operate with a variety of different platforms and programming languages, making it a very flexible service for your DevOps teams. Currently at the time of writing this course, Elastic Beanstalk is compatible with the following. One important point to note is that the service itself is free to use. There is no cost associated with Elastic Beanstalk, however, any resources that are created on your application's behalf, such as EC2 instances, you will be charged for as per the standard pricing policies at the time of deployment. 

So now we know at a high level what AWS Elastic Beanstalk is and does, let me run through some of its core components that creates the service. The application version. An application version is a very specific reference to a section of deployable code. The application version will point typically to S3, simple storage service to where the deployable code may reside. 

The environment. An environment refers to an application version that has been deployed on AWS resources. These resources are configured and provisioned by AWS Elastic Beanstalk. At this stage, the application is deployed as a solution and becomes operational within your environment. The environment is comprised of all the resources created by Elastic Beanstalk and not just an EC2 instance with your uploaded code. 

Environment configurations. An environment configuration is a collection of parameters and settings that dictate how an environment will have its resources provisioned by Elastic Beanstalk and how these resources will behave. The environment tier. This component reflects on how Elastic Beanstalk provisions resources based on what the application is designed to do. If the application manages and handles HTTP requests, then the app will be run in a web server environment. If the application does not process HTTP requests, and instead perhaps pulls data from an SQS queue, then it would run in a worker environment. I shall cover more on the differences between the web server and work environment shortly. 

The configuration template. This is the template that provides the baseline for creating a new, unique environment configuration. Platform. The platform is a culmination of components in which you can build your application upon using Elastic Beanstalk. These comprise of the operating system of the instance, the programming language, the server type, web or application, and components of Elastic Beanstalk itself, and as a whole can be defined as a platform. Applications. Within Elastic Beanstalk, an application is a collection of different elements, such as environments, environment configurations, and application versions. In fact, you can have multiple application versions held within a single application. You can deploy your application across one of two different environment tiers, either the web server tier or the worker tier. 

These tiers are configured differently depending on the use case of your application. The web server environment is typically used for standard web applications that operate and serve requests over HTTP port 80. This tier will typically use service and features such as Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, EC2, and Security Groups. The worker environment is slightly different and are used by applications that will have a back-end processing task that will interact with AWS SQS, the Simple Queue Service. This tier typically uses the following AWS resources in this environment, an SQS Queue, an IAM Service Role, Auto Scaling, and EC2. 

Now you are aware of some of the terminology and components, we can look at how AWS Elastic Beanstalk operates a very simple workflow process for your application deployment and ongoing management in what can be defined in four simple steps. Firstly, you create an application. Next, you must upload your application version of the application to Elastic Beanstalk, along with some additional configuration information regarding the application itself. This creates the environment configuration. The environment is then created by Elastic Beanstalk with the appropriate resources to run your code. Any management of your application can then take place, such as deploying new versions of your application. If the management of your applications have altered the environment configuration, then your environment will automatically be updated to reflect the new code should additional resources be required. For further information and to get some hands-on experience with AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy an application, take a look at our two labs which will guide you through the steps and processes we have discussed. 

That now brings us to the end of this lecture. Coming up next, I will introduce you to AWS Lambda.