AWS Elastic Beanstalk — PaaS Deployment

AWS Elastic Beanstalk — PaaS Deployment

Elastic Beanstalk is AWS’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. You upload your application code and Beanstalk handles provisioning EC2 instances, load balancers, auto-scaling, and deployment — all while keeping full EC2-level control if you need it.

In Azure terms: Elastic Beanstalk ≈ Azure App Service (but running on EC2 under the hood)

How It Works

1. Choose a platform (Node.js, Python, Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Go, Docker)
2. Upload your application code as a ZIP or container
3. Beanstalk creates and manages:
   • EC2 instances
   • Load balancer (ALB or NLB)
   • Auto Scaling Group
   • RDS (optional)
   • CloudWatch monitoring

You retain full access to the underlying EC2 instances — unlike Azure App Service where the underlying VMs are fully managed.

Supported Platforms

Platform	Runtime Versions
Node.js	18.x, 20.x
Python	3.11, 3.12
Java	8, 11, 17, 21 (Corretto)
.NET on Linux	.NET 8
.NET on Windows	.NET Framework 4.8
PHP	8.1, 8.2
Ruby	3.2
Go	1.21
Docker	Single container or multi-container (Docker Compose)

Deployment Policies

Policy	Description	Downtime
All at once	Deploy to all instances simultaneously	Brief downtime
Rolling	Deploy in batches — some instances update at a time	Minimal
Rolling with additional batch	Add extra capacity during deployment	Zero
Immutable	Deploy to new instances, swap when healthy	Zero
Traffic splitting	Canary — route % traffic to new version	Zero
Blue/Green	Deploy to separate environment, swap DNS	Zero

Configuration Files (.ebextensions)

Customize your Beanstalk environment with .ebextensions/*.config YAML/JSON files:

.ebextensions/environment.config

option_settings:
  aws:elasticbeanstalk:application:environment:
    DB_HOST: my-rds.abc123.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com
    NODE_ENV: production

  aws:autoscaling:asg:
    MinSize: 2
    MaxSize: 10

  aws:autoscaling:trigger:
    MeasureName: CPUUtilization
    Threshold: 70

Elastic Beanstalk vs Azure App Service

Feature	Elastic Beanstalk	Azure App Service
Abstraction level	Higher (PaaS) but EC2 accessible	Full PaaS — no VM access
Platforms	Node, Python, Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Go, Docker	Node, Python, Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Go, containers
Scaling	Auto Scaling Group (EC2)	Scale out settings (instance count)
Deployment slots	No (use Blue/Green environments)	Yes (staging slots + swap)
Pricing	Pay for underlying EC2 + LB	Per App Service Plan
Custom OS packages	Yes (via .ebextensions)	Limited (Kudu)
Container support	Single and multi-container Docker	Docker, custom containers

EB CLI

# Install EB CLI
pip install awsebcli

# Initialize in your project
eb init my-app --region us-east-1 --platform "node.js-20"

# Create an environment (provisions everything)
eb create my-env --instance-type t3.small --min-instances 2

# Deploy application
eb deploy

# Check environment status
eb status

# Open in browser
eb open

# View logs
eb logs

# SSH into an EC2 instance
eb ssh

# Terminate environment
eb terminate my-env

Useful Links

• Elastic Beanstalk Documentation
• Elastic Beanstalk Pricing (Free — pay only for underlying resources)
• EB CLI Reference