Hello and welcome to this short lecture which will provide you with an overview of the AWS Elastic Beanstalk service. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a managed service that allows you to upload code of your web application along with 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 just as you would with a custom-built environment. You can additionally perform some of the maintenance tasks from the Elastic Beanstalk dashboard itself. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is able to operate with a variety of different platforms and programming languages, making it a very flexible service for your devops team. Currently, at the time of writing this course, Elastic Beanstalk is compatible with the following: Packer Builder, Single Container Docker, Multicontainer Docker, Preconfigured Docker, Go, Java SE, Java with Tomcat, .NET on Windows Server with IIS, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby. 

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 policy 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 this 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, the 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 SQSQ, then it would run in a work environment. I shall cover more on the differences between the web server and the work environments in the next lecture. 

The configuration template. This is a template that provides the baseline for creating a new, unique environment configuration. Platform. A platform is a combination 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 an application. 

You should now have a greater understanding of what Amazon Elastic Beanstalk is and a high-level awareness of some of the elements used within the service. 

In the next lecture, I will be talking more about both the web server and the worker tiers mentioned previously.