What is AWS Beanstalk?

In this essential guide, we’ll cover AWS Elastic Beanstalk key features, benefits, how to get started, pricing, frequently asked questions, and more

What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a managed service that simplifies the deployment and scaling of web applications and services by automatically handling the underlying infrastructure. It abstracts the complexity of managing AWS resources, such as EC2, RDS, and load balancers, so developers can focus on writing code rather than provisioning and configuring the environment.

Elastic Beanstalk automatically provisions resources, handles capacity provisioning, auto-scaling, load balancing, and application health monitoring. Despite this automation, developers retain control over AWS services through the Elastic Beanstalk console, AWS CLI, or EB CLI, enabling tasks such as scaling instances or monitoring the application directly.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Features & Components

Environment: Elastic Beanstalk manages environments, which are instances where your application runs. Each environment runs a specific version of an application, and it can have one of two tiers: web server or worker environments.
Environment Tier:
- Web Server Tier: Handles HTTP(S) requests for applications like websites and APIs.
- Worker Tier: Processes background tasks or jobs using AWS SQS (Simple Queue Service) for handling task queues.
Application: This is the logical collection of Elastic Beanstalk components, including environments, versions, and configurations. An application is essentially the container for everything related to your app.
Application Version: This is a specific, deployable iteration of your code. Elastic Beanstalk allows you to maintain multiple versions of an application, making it easy to roll back or deploy new updates.
Platform: Elastic Beanstalk supports a variety of platforms like Node.js, Python, Ruby, .NET, and Docker. The platform is the runtime environment for your application, including language runtime and web server.
Environment Configuration: This contains the settings for an Elastic Beanstalk environment, such as instance type, autoscaling, load balancer, and VPC configuration. You can adjust these based on your requirements.
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): Elastic Beanstalk uses load balancers to distribute incoming traffic across multiple instances, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.
Auto Scaling: Beanstalk integrates with Auto Scaling to automatically adjust the number of Amazon EC2 instances, scaling web applications based on traffic demand for better cost and performance
Monitoring and Health Checks: Elastic Beanstalk provides monitoring tools like Amazon CloudWatch and built-in health checks to keep track of the application’s performance and status.
RDS and other Services: Elastic Beanstalk integrates with other Amazon services like RDS (Relational Database Service), S3, and IAM, providing a seamless deployment and resource management experience.

Getting started with Elastic Beanstalk

To get started with an Elastic Beanstalk application, you can follow this AWS-provided tutorial to create an AWS account, create an example application using Elastic Beanstalk, explore and configure your Beanstalk environment, etc. Let’s quickly break down the three ways to get started.

1. AWS Management Console

The AWS Management Console is perhaps the easiest way to get started with Elastic Beanstalk due to its user-friendly graphical interface:

Sign in to your AWS account and navigate to the Elastic Beanstalk console.

Create a new application by specifying a name and description.

Choose an environment tier (Web server environment or Worker environment), platform, and application code. You can upload your code or use sample code provided by AWS.

Configure settings such as instance type, environment variables, scaling options, and more.

Launch the environment. Elastic Beanstalk will handle the provisioning and deployment of the necessary resources.

Monitor and manage your application directly from the console, where you can scale, update, and monitor the health of your environments.

2. AWS Command Line Interface (CLI)

For those who prefer command-line tools, the AWS CLI allows you to manage all aspects of your Elastic Beanstalk environments:

Install and configure the AWS CLI if you haven’t already, ensuring you have the necessary permissions.

Use the create-application and create-environment commands to deploy your application. For example:

				
					aws elasticbeanstalk create-application 
--application-name my-app aws elasticbeanstalk create-environment
--application-name my-app --environment-name my-env
--solution-stack-name "64bit Amazon Linux 2 v3.3.6 running Python 3.8"

Manage your environment using commands to update, describe, and eventually terminate your environments.

3. Elastic Beanstalk CLI (EB CLI)

The EB CLI is a higher-level CLI specifically designed to simplify working with Elastic Beanstalk:

Install the EB CLI on your local machine. This typically involves Python and pip.

Initialize your application in your project directory using eb init and follow the prompts to set up your application and environment configurations.

Create and deploy an environment using eb create. You can specify various parameters inline or modify the config.yml file generated during initialization.

Use eb deploy to deploy new versions of your application and eb terminate to clean up resources when they are no longer needed.

Manage your environment using various EB CLI commands to scale, set environment variables, and more.

How does AWS Elastic Beanstalk Pricing Work?

Technically, there is no charge for AWS Elastic Beanstalk itself. But while While Elastic Beanstalk itself doesn’t incur additional charges, it’s not entirely “free” because the underlying AWS resources (such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and S3 storage) that Elastic Beanstalk service provisions will still cost money. Beanstalk simply automates the process of managing and provisioning these resources, helping you focus on web application development.

How do you cost-optimize AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Here are some key approache you can use to better cost optimize Elastic Beanstalk:

Using EC2 Spot Instances:

Elastic Beanstalk allows you to use EC2 Spot Instances, which can save you up to 90% on compute costs compared to On-Demand pricing. Spot Instances are ideal for applications that are stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible—like test environments that can handle interruptions.

Converting Between Load Balanced and Single Instances:

For non-production workloads, you can reduce costs by switching from load balanced environments to single-instance environments outside of peak hours. This can be automated via AWS CLI commands or cron jobs to ensure minimal instances are running when traffic is low.

Reducing the Number of Instances:

During low-traffic periods, you can automatically reduce the number of instances in an environment to zero or one, further cutting down on costs without shutting down the environment completely.

Temporarily Stopping Environments:

If you don’t need environments (like testing environments) running overnight, you can terminate them after work hours and restore them in the morning using automation scripts. However, be careful with environments that have integrated RDS instances, as terminating them could lead to data loss unless the RDS instances are decoupled.

Frequently Asked Questions about Elastic Beanstalk

What are the benefits of Elastic Beanstalk?

WS Elastic Beanstalk offers a practical solution for developers looking to quickly deploy web applications on AWS. When using Elastic Beanstalk, you just need to upload your source code and Elastic Beanstalk will automates tasks like capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring, allowing developers to focus on coding rather than infrastructure management.

What are the limitations of Elastic Beanstalk?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk simplifies deploying and managing applications, but it has limitations, such as reduced control over the infrastructure and platform restrictions that may not support specific language versions or frameworks. Customization and deep configuration can be complex, and while the service itself is free, the resources it provisions are not, potentially leading to unexpected costs. Elastic Beanstalk also introduces a learning curve and can pose challenges in debugging and vendor lock-in, making it less suitable for scenarios requiring granular control or future platform independence.

Which languages and development stacks does AWS Elastic Beanstalk support?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports the following:

Apache Tomcat for Java

Apache HTTP Server for PHP

Apache HTTP Server for Python

Nginx or Apache HTTP Server for Node.js

Passenger or Puma for Ruby

Microsoft IIS 7.5, 8.0, and 8.5 for .NET applications

Java SE

Docker

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