Elastic Beanstalk Environment Management

In this, we will learn about Elastic Beanstalk Environment Management.

Elastic Beanstalk manage separate environments for
- Development
- Testing
- production use
Deploy any version of application to any environment.
Environments can be long-running or temporary.
If terminating an environment, you can save its configuration to recreate later.
During application development, it is deployed often to different environments for different purposes.
Elastic Beanstalk easily configure how deployments are performed.
Either deploy to all of the instances simultaneously or split deployment into batches with rolling deployments.
Select platform version when launching an environment
Can also split application into multiple components, each running in a separate environment.

Elastic Beanstalk Environment Management Console:

provides a management page for each Elastic Beanstalk environments
manage environment’s configuration
perform common actions like
- restarting the web servers running
- cloning the environment
- rebuilding the environment from scratch.

Environment Dashboard

main view of the environment management console is a dashboard
To view
- choose Dashboard on the navigation pane.
environment management dashboard shows
- environment’s health
- application version
- information about the in-use platform
- list of recent events generated by the environment.

Various sections of Dashboard are:

Health

Shows the overall health of the environment.
environment status is shown with a Causes button
choose to view more information about current status.

Recent Events

Shows most recent events emitted by environment.
List is updated in real time when environment is being updated.

Environment Management Actions

Actions menu perform common operations on environment.
This menu is on right side of environment header under the Create New Environment option.
Actions include
- Load Configuration – Load a previously saved configuration.
- Save Configuration – Save current configuration of environment to application.
- Swap Environment URLs – Swap CNAME of current environment with a new environment.
- Clone Environment – Launch a new environment with the same configuration as currently running environment.
- Abort Current Operation – Stop an in-progress environment update.
- Restart App Servers – Restart the web server running on environment’s instances.
- Rebuild Environment – Terminate all resources in the running environment and build a new environment with the same settings.
- Terminate Environment – Terminate all resources in the running environment, and remove the environment from the application.
- Restore Environment – If the environment has been terminated in the last hour, restore it from this page. After an hour, you can restore it from the application overview page.

Configuration

It shows current configuration of environment and resources,
It lists
- EC2 instances
- load balancer
- notifications
- health monitoring settings
It helps to customize
- behavior of environment during deployments
- enable additional features

modify the instance type and other settings chosen during environment creation.

Logs

lets you retrieve logs from EC2 instances in environment.
When logs are requested,
- Elastic Beanstalk sends a command to the instances
- which then upload logs to Elastic Beanstalk storage bucket in S3.
- When requesting logs on this page, Elastic Beanstalk automatically deletes them from S3 after 15 minutes.

Environment Types

Can create one of environment types, as
- load-balancing
- autoscaling environment
- single-instance
environment type depends on application to deploy.

Load-balancing, Autoscaling Environment

uses ELB and EC2 Auto Scaling
EC2 Auto Scaling starts additional instances
If need to running in multiple Availability Zones, use a load-balancing, autoscaling environment. Can switch environment type later.

Single-Instance Environment

It contains one EC2 instance with an Elastic IP address.
It doesn’t have a load balancer
It uses EC2 Auto Scaling service but, minimum, maximum and desired capacity are set to 1. Hence, , new instances are not started if increased load.
Use it, if application to have low traffic or doing remote development.

To change an environment’s type

Open the Elastic Beanstalk console.
Navigate to the management page for your environment.
Choose Configuration.
In the Capacity category, choose Modify.

Recommended values

The recommended values set in API, are

Elastic Beanstalk console

Namespace: aws:autoscaling:launchconfiguration

Option Names: IamInstanceProfile, EC2KeyName, InstanceType

Namespace: aws:autoscaling:updatepolicy:rollingupdate

Option Names: RollingUpdateType and RollingUpdateEnabled

Namespace: aws:elasticbeanstalk:application

Option Name: Application Healthcheck URL

Namespace: aws:elasticbeanstalk:command

Option Name: DeploymentPolicy, BatchSize and BatchSizeType

Namespace: aws:elasticbeanstalk:environment

Option Name: ServiceRole

Namespace: aws:elasticbeanstalk:healthreporting:system

Option Name: SystemType and HealthCheckSuccessThreshold

Namespace: aws:elasticbeanstalk:sns:topics

Option Name: Notification Endpoint

Namespace: aws:elasticbeanstalk:sqsd

Option Name: HttpConnections

Namespace: aws:elb:loadbalancer

Option Name: CrossZone

Namespace: aws:elb:policies

Option Names: ConnectionDrainingTimeout and ConnectionDrainingEnabled

EB CLI

Namespace: aws:autoscaling:launchconfiguration

Option Names: IamInstanceProfile, InstanceType

Namespace: aws:autoscaling:updatepolicy:rollingupdate