🌱 What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that allows developers to deploy and manage applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure (servers, load balancers, networking, scaling, etc.).

🧠 It's like saying: "Here’s my app. AWS, you handle everything else!"

🚀 Key Features

Feature Description
Fully Managed Platform Handles provisioning of EC2, ELB, Auto Scaling, and RDS
Multi-language Support Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Go, Docker, etc.
Zero Configuration Just upload your code; Beanstalk figures out how to run it
Built-in Monitoring Integrates with CloudWatch and provides environment health
Auto Scaling Automatically scales your app based on traffic
Rolling Updates Supports zero-downtime deployments

🧱 Supported Architectures

  • Web apps (Java/Spring Boot, Django, Flask, Express)
  • Background workers
  • Dockerized apps
  • Single or multi-instance deployments

📦 What AWS Services It Uses Under the Hood

Elastic Beanstalk automates configuration of:

  • EC2 (compute)
  • ELB / ALB (load balancing)
  • Auto Scaling Group
  • CloudWatch (monitoring)
  • S3 (store app versions)
  • RDS (optional, for DB)
  • IAM roles & policies

🛠️ How It Works – Deployment Flow

  1. You package and upload your code via:
    1. AWS Console
    2. EB CLI / AWS CLI
    3. GitHub / CI/CD pipeline
  2. Elastic Beanstalk:
    1. Launches EC2 instances
    2. Deploys your app
    3. Configures load balancing and auto-scaling
    4. Monitors app health
  3. You manage environment variables, logs, scaling, and deployments via UI or CLI

✅ Example: Deploying a Spring Boot App

eb init -p java my-spring-app
eb create dev-env
eb deploy

That's it. AWS handles server, load balancer, auto-scaling, and monitoring setup.

🎯 When to Use Elastic Beanstalk?

✅ Ideal for:

  • Small to medium apps needing fast, managed deployment
  • Teams who want to avoid managing infrastructure
  • MVPs and demos needing quick time-to-market

🚫 Not ideal for:

  • Highly customized infrastructure needs
  • Extremely large-scale systems (use ECS/EKS/Lambda instead)

💰 Pricing

  • Elastic Beanstalk itself is free
  • You pay only for the underlying resources (EC2, ELB, etc.)

✅ Summary

Feature Value
Type PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)
Languages Supported Java, Python, Node.js, .NET, etc.
Deployment Speed Very fast, automated
Infrastructure Fully managed by AWS
Scalability Auto Scaling built-in
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