The essence of this article is to demonstrate how flexible and expedient applications can easily be deployed to the cloud, without having to deal with the operational overhead involved when provisioning and managing virtual servers (EC2 instances, as in the case of AWS).
AWS PaaS offering; Elastic Beanstalk is the service that simplifies and achieves the objective of deploying applications without having to manually spin up servers,install operating systems,patch,and perform other related system jobs to prepare an instance for its workload in the cloud. This affords any organisation or business entity to dedicate more time on what distinguishes its business and increase productivity rather than performing routine and repetitive infrastructural jobs that do not add to the value of its operation.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is beneficial for a myriad of use cases that facilitates the development process and offers business value. These include but are not limited to the following
i. An application is able to withstand a surge in traffic due to the inclusion of autoscaling in the Elastic Beanstalk service
ii. Elastic beanstalk allows for an application to have multiple versions that can be easily and effectively rolled back to previous states. This is very instrumental to keep the most stable version of an application in production whiles new updates can be worked on and packaged to be shipped when they are ready for the production environment with various options for deployment as well.
iii. It’s also compatible with Linux and windows OS in server environments.
iv. In addition, a wide variety of programming languages and their various runtimes are supported in Elastic Beanstalk. These include Node.js,ruby,python,Java and PHP to list just a few.
v. Another important feature of this service is that, you can monitor the health of your workloads. This ensures that the critical requirements of monitoring and observability are not overlooked.
vi. The load balancer provisioned by elastic beanstalk to be the gateway to an application can also be configured with a HTTPS protocol to ensure security by allowing traffic from specific ports.
vii. It also ensures high availability by virtue of its capacity to be provisioned in multiple availability zones.
A common factor that persists in each aforementioned point is the convenience and expediency elastic beanstalk affords an organization in the deployment of an application.
Getting Started
If you are interested in a practical demonstration of how to get started with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you can go through the source code along with a step-by-step instruction on a Node.js project I worked on and deployed using Elastic Beanstalk. It can be found on the development branch(dev) of my GitHub repository https://github.com/Wonder717/Engineering-Full-Stack-Apps-in-the-Cloud.git.
Additionally, Elastic Beanstalk can easily be used from the command line as and it is not just constrained to the web console. AWS provides the option to use Elastic Beanstalk's command line utility tool known as eb. Using the CLI tool, you can conveniently initialise a new application using the command eb init and proceed to create a new environment for your workload by entering eb create. You specify the configuration for the specific needs of your application from the prompts, and use eb deploy to push changes whenever you make modifications to your environment. A comprehensive list of these commands can be found from the official documentation which provides more helpful information about this PaaS offering from AWS. https://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/eb3-cmd-commands.html
Hopefully, this article has provided you with a fair overview
of what AWS Elastic Beanstalk entails, and how you can easily get started with this service to facilitate your development and deployment process when building applications.
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