Elastic Beanstalk

Chapter 4. Hacking Elastic Beanstalk

The purpose of this chapter is to explore where Elastic Beanstalk ends, and where we can begin to adjust the system ourselves. We’ll start by delving into the way the Elastic Beanstalk instances integrate with the Elastic Beanstalk Service. If we understand this, we can slowly start to customize the image that runs our application (and the instances that are launched from it); we’ll change the logging, replace the OpenJDK with the Sun JDK, and replace Apache with Nginx. An interesting way to change an infrastructure is to take things out, which is exactly what we’ll do in the end: we’ll make the Elastic Load Balancer bypass Apache or Nginx altogether.

So, we understand how Elastic Beanstalk works and have sort of mastered the fundamentals. It is time to go a little bit further. Why not get our hands dirty and change those fundamentals? Chapter 2 introduced the concepts underlying the AWS services Elastic Beanstalk uses. There is not time to get into the details of working with every one of those things. If you want more details on how to create an AMI, for example, we suggest you read Programming Amazon EC2.

Building on top of Elastic Beanstalk, we can do all sorts of interesting things. Perhaps you want to use Nginx instead of Apache. Or you are contemplating just ignoring Apache for the Tomcat traffic. You might be using some features on the Sun JDK that you are used to, and they are not implemented (yet) in the OpenJDK.

Well, the good news is, ...