AWS Elastic Beanstalk Primer

This repository contains an introduction project to AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The goal of this project is to illustrate how to spin up a simple PHP application using AWS Beanstalk.

About AWS Beanstalk

AWS Beanstalk is a service for deploying and scaling web applications developed in many popular languages like NodeJS, Python, PHP, .NET, etc..., on a server like Tomcat, Apache, IIS, Node. AWS Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment of your application creating the underlying infrastructure: capacity provision, load balancing, autoscaling, and application health.

You retain control of the resources created by AWS Beanstalk and pay just for the used resources.

Features

• Fast / Easy way to deploy web apps (3-tiers applications) on AWS
• Automatically scales your app up and down
• You can configure your runtime environment
• You can retain control over the created resources or let Beanstalk manage them for you
• Beanstalk automatically manages platform updates (Java, PHP, Node, etc...)

Run terraform

Move to the ./examples/php-app directory and run

terraform apply -var="app_name=example-php-app" -var="app_version=v1"

Create multiple environment

You can create multiple environment by passing the num variable

terraform apply -var="app_name=example-php-app" -var="app_version=v1" -var="num=3"

Update your app version

This primer is using the following update strategy: rolling update type time bach size 25%.

You can configure a different update strategy by changing the appropriate attributes in ./modules/beanstalk/main.tf resource aws_elastic_beanstalk_environment. The meta-argument controlling the update strategy is the setting argument, in particular the one having as namespace

• aws:autoscaling:updatepolicy:rollingupdate
• aws:elasticbeanstalk:command

To see a comprehensive list of settings and their values visit AWS doc at this link.

In this example you need to apply the configuration at the folder ./examples/php-app/release-version-2 to upload new version of your PHP example app. In this example we create a new state for the updated app version, you can also use the same state by applying the config at ./examples/php-app defining a different app_version variable.

This different state approach has been taken because it allows us to define and keep different app versions rather than replacing the existing resource with a new one.

terraform apply -var="app_name=example-php-app" -var="app_version=v2"

Finally to deploy your app to the environment

aws --region $(terraform output --raw region) elasticbeanstalk update-environment --environment-name $(terraform output --raw environment_name) --version-label $(terraform output --raw app_version)

Update multiple environment

If you created more than one environment you need to pass the num variable

terraform apply -var="app_name=example-php-app" -var="app_version=v2" -var="num=2"