AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Yes, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS solution. Usually, developers use PaaS (platform-as-a-service) to build applications or software. Driven by the virtualization technology, PaaS offers them a scalable tier of resources to suit their varied needs. These resources are easy to access and run by multiple users. Elastic Beanstalk offers AWS Cloud resources such as Amazon RDS, Amazon EC2, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, etc. to set up an environment where your applications can run smoothly.

By using EC2 instances, you can build and launch servers in the AWS cloud. These instances provide you with an entire range of web services API to access different services available on the AWS platform. Basically, Elastic Beanstalk is one layer of abstraction farther from the EC2 layer. When you build a Beanstalk application, the servers are EC2 instances. However, the environment that’s set up also contains other AWS components like Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, etc.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports web applications created using a variety of languages and frameworks (Java, Node.js, Python, etc). Transitioning from the development machine to the AWS Cloud is easy as minimal to no coding changes are needed. With Beanstalk, you’ll get an array of application deployment options. These include the Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface, AWS Management Console, Eclipse, and Visual Studio. For your application health monitoring, Elastic Beanstalk collects over 40 key attributes and metrics. Automatic application management and updation plus auto scaling and customization of applications are its other notable features. Beanstalk is also compliant with PCI, ISO, HIPAA, SOC 3, SOC 2, and SOC 1.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports programming languages such as Java, Go, PHP, Node.js, Python, and Ruby. But you may ask whether it will support other languages. The answer is YES. Elastic Beanstalk is designed in such a way that in the future, it can be extended to support several other programming languages and development stacks. At present, AWS is working closely with solution providers to develop the APIs and capabilities required for building supplementary Elastic Beanstalk offerings.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk lets you choose from the following deployment options:

• All at once: Here, all instances in your environment are deployed simultaneously. This means all your instances will be out of service for a little bit while the deployment happens.
• Rolling: Deployment occurs in batches. During deployment, each batch is taken out of service. This decreases the capacity of your environment by the number of instances that a batch contains.
• Rolling with additional batch: Beanstalk provisions an extra batch of instances at first. The new version then gets deployed in batches. Thus, this method ensures that you’ve got full capacity while the deployment is in progress. Even if the deployment fails, your instance fleet size won’t be affected.
• Immutable: This method considers your instances as immutable. This means they aren’t updated or changed, but replaced. Your fleet size will be duplicated by Elastic Beanstalk for a short time, after which it’ll start deployments to them. After a successful deployment, old instances will get terminated.
• Traffic splitting: You can use this method for deploying the new version of application to a fresh group of instances. Then, you can divide incoming client traffic temporarily between the new application version and the existing one.

Elastic Beanstalk supports Apache HTTP server for PHP applications, Node.js applications, and Python applications. Additionally, it supports Nginx server for Node.js applications and Apache Tomcat for Java applications. Puma or Passenger for Ruby applications and Microsoft IIS 8.5, 8.0, and 7.5 for .NET applications along with Java SE, Go, and Docker are also supported by it. You can even use Amazon RDS to add a PostgreSQL, SQL, MySQL, or Oracle server database to your environment after or during the Beanstalk environment creation.