Elastic Beanstalk 101: A Comprehensive Walkthrough for All
Tags: aws, cloudcomputing, elasticbeanstalk, infrastructureascode
Published: 2023-07-06 02:53:05

As technology advances at a very fast pace, developers seek efficient solutions that simplify the complexities of application deployment, scaling, and monitoring. Elastic Beanstalk emerges as a powerful tool in the AWS ecosystem, providing a seamless experience for developers by automating infrastructure provisioning, load balancing, and capacity management. With Elastic Beanstalk, developers can focus on writing code and leave the heavy lifting of infrastructure management to AWS. All these make application deployment and monitoring as simple as a few clicks with highly customizable capabilities to suit diverse requirements and use cases. In this article, we are going to explore the features that make it possible for Elastic Beanstalk to play its role as a catalyst for accelerating application deployment. We will start by having a high-level overview of Elastic Beanstalk and then move on to talking about bigger things like the various deployment options it employs, how it uses CloudFormation and other core features. Whether you are a seasoned developer looking to enhance your AWS knowledge or a curious beginner looking to understand the basics of Elastic Beanstalk, you are in the right place. Without further ado, let’s begin!

## Elastic Beanstalk Overview
In a traditional scenario, deploying an application on AWS involves configuring and managing many resources such as EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, and databases. All this requires deep knowledge of AWS services and infrastructure management practices. For developers who want to be free of the hassle of infrastructure provisioning and management and deploy their applications within minutes in the AWS cloud, Elastic Beanstalk comes to their rescue.

It is a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) offering by AWS aimed at automating the process of deploying, managing, and scaling applications in the cloud. Elastic Beanstalk takes away the complexities of infrastructure management, allowing developers to focus on writing code and delivering applications at a faster rate. It provides a comprehensive environment for deploying web applications, APIs, and background worker processes in the AWS Cloud. Beanstalk supports a vast range of programming languages, frameworks, and platforms, offering flexibility for developers coming from diverse backgrounds.

Elastic Beanstalk is a free service. You only pay for the resources that it provisions and manages. Even though some of the benefits of using this service are already evident to you by now, we are still going to take a look at some of its other benefits. These benefits are;

- Elastic Beanstalk simplifies the process of updating applications and their environments. It allows for easy versioning and rollback, enabling developers to deploy new features or bug fixes with confidence and revert to previous versions when needed.
- It integrates with AWS CloudWatch, making it possible for developers to monitor the health, performance, and resource utilization of their applications. Beanstalk provides logs and metrics that help diagnose issues, troubleshoot problems, and optimize application performance.
- Elastic Beanstalk also supports a wide range of platforms, programming languages, and frameworks, enabling developers to choose their preferred technology stack. It provides built-in configurations and pre-configured environments for popular platforms, streamlining the setup process for different application types. To top it all off, it allows you to create a custom platform if your desired platform is not supported
- Elastic Beanstalk helps optimize resource utilization by automatically scaling the application environment based on demand. It eliminates the need to provision and maintain excess resources, leading to cost savings by ensuring efficient resource allocation.
- Elastic Beanstalk seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon RDS for database management, Amazon S3 for storage, and AWS IAM for security and access control. This integration enables developers to leverage additional services and functionalities within their applications.

## Elastic Beanstalk Environments
Environments represent a specific deployment configuration and runtime environment for your application. In Elastic Beanstalk, they play an integral role in managing and running your applications. Beanstalk supports two main types of environments: Web and worker environments to accommodate different application deployment scenarios. Let’s look at each of these environments in brief detail.

**_Web Environments_** — They are specifically designed for hosting web applications and serving HTTP/HTTPS traffic. They provide load balancing, auto-scaling, URL routing and other web-specific features. Web environments are ideal for applications that serve web pages, APIs, or web services.
**_Worker Environments_** — They are geared towards executing background tasks or long-running processes asynchronously. They are used for handling tasks that are triggered by events or messages, such as processing items from a message queue such as Amazon SQS, executing scheduled jobs, or performing data processing tasks.

## Elastic Beanstalk Deployment Modes
In this section, we are going to examine the various deployment options or strategies provided by Beanstalk to enable you to perform updates on your applications. These strategies are; All at once, Rolling Updates, Rolling Updates with Additional Batches, Traffic Splitting and Immutable. We are going to explore these strategies one after the other, providing a suitable use case for each.

### All at Once
With this strategy, Elastic Beanstalk deploys the new version of your application to all instances in the environment simultaneously. During the deployment process, all instances in your environment are out of service for a short time while the deployment occurs. This strategy is suitable for applications that can tolerate a short period of unavailability during the deployment process. It is the fastest deployment option but involves a little bit of downtime.

### Rolling updates
In this deployment mode, updates are applied to a set of instances at a time (the set of instances is called a bucket). Once updates are applied to one bucket successfully, the deployment process moves to the next bucket (set of instances). As instances are updated in batches or sets, application availability is maintained. This deployment mode helps mitigate downtime and provides a smoother transition to the new application version.

### Rolling updates with Additional Batches
This deployment mode is similar to the Rolling updates mode with the core difference being that in this mode, the application’s full capacity is maintained. How is this done? This is done by spinning up a new batch of instances before starting the actual deployment process. If you trying to keep your costs low, this mode might not be the best option for you as it incurs additional costs as new instances are launched.

### Immutable
This is another deployment option you should only engage in if you are prepared to incur additional costs. With this mode, a new group of instances is launched and the updates are deployed to this fresh group of instances. For the duration of the deployment, your application is running at double capacity thereby incurring additional costs. Some of the perks of this mode are that your application has zero downtime and you can easily roll back to the previous version if there are any issues with the deployment.

### Traffic Splitting
Traffic splitting allows you to gradually shift traffic between different versions of your application by enabling you to control the percentage of traffic that is routed to each version, facilitating a smooth transition and reducing the impact on end users. With this deployment mode, you spin up a new group of instances on which the updated version of the application is deployed. Traffic is then split temporarily between this new group of instances and the group of instances running the previous version of your application. Alongside the traffic percentage, you can also configure the time, in minutes, that Elastic Beanstalk waits after an initial healthy deployment before proceeding to shift all incoming client traffic to the new application version that you deployed. Traffic splitting is commonly used in canary testing.

If this is hard for you to understand, [click here](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features.deploy-existing-version.html) for a summary of the deployment options.

## Elastic Beanstalk & CloudFormation
Under the hood, Beanstalk leverages CloudFormation to manage the underlying infrastructure and resources required for your application environment. If I have left you wondering what CloudFormation is, it is an AWS service that allows you to define and provision AWS resources in a declarative manner using templates written in JSON or YAML. Here’s how Beanstalk works with CloudFormation.

When you create an Elastic Beanstalk environment, Beanstalk makes use of CloudFormation to define and provision the required resources for your environment. This includes resources such as EC2 instances, load balancers, databases, and security groups. Based on your application and environment configuration, Elastic Beanstalk generates a CloudFormation template behind the scenes. This template describes the desired state of the infrastructure and resources needed for your environment. Elastic Beanstalk then uses CloudFormation to create a CloudFormation stack based on the generated template. The stack represents the collection of AWS resources provisioned for your Elastic Beanstalk environment. CloudFormation manages the lifecycle of the stack, including resource creation, updates, and deletion.

When you make changes such as modifying scaling options or updating environment variables to your environment, Elastic Beanstalk translates these changes into updates to the underlying CloudFormation stack. CloudFormation handles the resource updates and ensures that the environment reflects the desired configuration. If you delete an Elastic Beanstalk environment, Elastic Beanstalk makes use of CloudFormation to remove the associated CloudFormation stack. This ensures that all resources provisioned for the environment, including EC2 instances, load balancers, and databases, are cleaned up properly.

## Elastic Beanstalk Cloning
This is the last feature of Beanstalk we are going to talk about in this article. Cloning allows you to create a copy or clone of your Beanstalk environment. A scenario where this feature proves to be useful is when you want to create a test environment from your production environment. In this case, you can simply create a clone of your production environment using the cloning feature of Beanstalk. When you create a clone of an environment, the configurations of all resources are preserved.

## Final Thoughts
To wrap up, Elastic Beanstalk serves as an indispensable tool for simplifying application deployment and management on the AWS platform. By exploring Elastic Beanstalk from the ground up, we have uncovered its core concepts, examined its various deployment options, and delved into how it uses CloudFormation under the hood. It goes without saying but must be said again that whether you are a seasoned developer seeking streamlined application deployment or a newcomer looking to leverage the capabilities of AWS, Elastic Beanstalk empowers you to focus on your code and deliver applications with ease. As you embark on your journey with Elastic Beanstalk, remember to experiment, embrace best practices, and stay up to date with the ever-evolving AWS ecosystem. With Elastic Beanstalk at your disposal, you are well-equipped to accelerate your application deployment, scale effortlessly, and maximize the potential of your AWS infrastructure.