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Elastic BeanStalk

  • Elastic Beanstalk also supports deployment versioning.
  • It maintains a copy of older deployments so that it is easy for the developer to rollback any changes made on the application.
  • Elastic Beanstalk is best suited for running web applications that are developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker.

CloudFormation vs BeanStalk

CloudFormation deals more with the AWS infrastructure rather than applications.

CloudFormation supports Elastic Beanstalk application environments. This allows you, for example, to create and manage an AWS Elastic Beanstalk–hosted application along with an RDS database to store the application data.

Blue-Green Deployment

Use Swap Environment URLs feature

Because AWS Elastic Beanstalk performs an in-place update when you update your application versions, your application might become unavailable to users for a short period of time. To avoid this, perform a blue/green deployment. To do this, deploy the new version to a separate environment, and then swap the CNAMEs of the two environments to redirect traffic to the new version instantly.

DNS Switch can be managed gradually by using the Amazon Route 53 weighted routing policy.

Things to consider

  • In some scenarios, sharing a data store isn’t desired or feasible. Schema changes are too complex to decouple.
  • Data locality introduces too much performance degradation tothe application, as when the blue and green environments are in geographically disparate regions.
  • All of these situations require a solution where the data store is inside of the deployment environment boundary and tightly coupled to the blue and green applications respectively.

You should consider using feature flags in your application to make it deployment aware.