Elastic Beanstalk

Chapter 1. Up and Running with Elastic Beanstalk

Applications deployed on Elastic Beanstalk are “cloud citizens.” Therefore, they have to submit to “cloud law.” The resulting requirements are sensible for any application expecting to grow above a certain level of traffic. We’ll start this chapter with a description of these requirements, illustrated with examples of applications. Then we will choose an application that is ready for the cloud, and ready for Elastic Beanstalk, and deploy it. The sample application is also available under GPL license, so you can try the full example yourself. You can even use the application, because it’s a generic URL shortener, ready to use. At the end of this chapter you should know how to deploy a Java application on Elastic Beanstalk.

What Is Elastic Beanstalk?

But what is Elastic Beanstalk, actually? Elastic Beanstalk is one of the many Amazon Web Services, and its purpose is to let developers and engineers easily deploy and run web applications in the cloud, but in a way that they are highly available and scalable. It stands next to other AWS services (like EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, and Auto Scaling —if you are not familiar with these concepts, you can fast forward to Chapter 2, where they are explained in more detail), and uses sensible defaults that you can modify to adapt to your application needs.

Perhaps Beanstalk’s most important feature is deployment. Deployment has always been quite a hassle, even using tools like Hudson or ...