Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a managed service designed to simplify the deployment and operation of applications in the AWS cloud. With just a few commands, it deploys and manages the entire application infrastructure: servers, load balancers, databases, monitoring, and auto-scaling.

Imagine a team that has just wrapped up development on a web application. The deadline to launch is hours away. The app works, the code is tested, but deployment is still unresolved. Provisioning EC2 instances, configuring load balancers, setting up Auto Scaling, defining environment variables, and planning rollback mechanisms—all that infrastructure work remains untouched. There’s no time, and no dedicated DevOps team to lean on.

In this scenario, managing infrastructure manually isn’t just inefficient; it risks delaying the entire release. Elastic Beanstalk becomes the most effective solution. With a single deployment command or console upload, it handles everything: provisioning the environment, scaling resources, routing traffic, monitoring application health, and enabling safe rollbacks.

With a clear understanding of what Elastic Beanstalk is and the kinds of challenges it helps solve, it’s time to explore how the service works in practice. Let’s walk through the deployment workflow and see what Elastic Beanstalk offers.

Deployment workflow

Elastic Beanstalk supports all major languages, such as Java, .NET, Go, PHP, Python, and Ruby, and also works seamlessly with Docker. This flexibility means we can quickly bring our app to the cloud without re-architecting or worrying about low-level configuration.

The application deployment workflow is simple:

• Package the application code and dependencies.

• Upload through the AWS Management Console or the EB CLI.

Beanstalk provisions the necessary infrastructure and manages the deployment lifecycle, including health checks and environment monitoring. Here’s what the workflow looks like:

Environment models

In Elastic Beanstalk, an application runs within an environment, a managed collection of AWS resources with its own configuration and lifecycle. We can create multiple environments for the same application, each hosting a different version or stage (like dev, test, and prod). When launching an environment, we choose one of two tiers:

• Web server tier: This tier handles HTTP requests for web applications and APIs. It uses a load balancer and auto-scaling to manage incoming traffic.

• Worker tier: This tier runs background jobs or processes asynchronous workloads using Amazon SQS queues. It is ideal for offloading computational or time-consuming tasks from a web application.

This separation allows us to cleanly support real-world application patterns, such as having a web environment for user ...