Intro

• PaaS which provides platform for developers to write and easily deploy code. It automatically creates the necessary infrastructure (EC2, ELB, SG, etc.) in AWS.
• Good for non-serverless applications
• Automatically handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, application health monitoring, instance configuration, etc. but we have full control over the configuration.
• Free (pay for the underlying resources spawned by Beanstalk)
• Supports versioning of application code
• Can create multiple environment (dev, test, prod)
• Supports the deployment of web applications from Docker containers and automatically handles load balancing, auto-scaling, monitoring, and placing containers across the cluster.
• Supports pretty much any programming language and even Docker containers.
• Beanstalk CLI helps manage the applications from CLI.
• Beanstalk uses CloudFormation under the hood to provision resources.

Components

• Application: collection of Beanstalk components (environment, versions, config, etc.)
• Application Version: version of your application code
• Environment: collection of AWS resources running an application version
  • Environments are created under the application
  • Only 1 application version can be running at a time in an environment
  • Can create multiple environments (dev, test, prod) with separate configurations inside an application

Web Server & Worker Environment Tier

• Web Environment (Web Server Tier): clients requests are directly handled by EC2 instances through a load balancer.