iPROFS Technology Blog

Recently Amazon has launch their Elastic Beanstalk as part of there Cloud service offering. The Elastic Beanstalk functions as an infinite scalable application server while taking away a lot of system administration work. A closer look reveals that it is the combined functionality of the the Elastic Load Balancer and the Elastic Compute Cloud. As a result one does not need to setup any system with an OS, additional applications and neither does one have to consider system security. Therefore, only knowledge of building, uploading and deploying a war file is needed. These typical development tasks enable a developer to run and maintain a web application without the help of a system administrator.

The first step to use the Elastic Beanstalk service is setting up an amazon account if you have not done so already, because you might have bought something there, followed by the sign up for the service.

The second step is log-in to the Amazon Webservices Console and start registering your application. In the AWS console this is referred to as Environment and via ‘Create Environment’ you can setup, upload and deploy your first application. In the AWS console you can also maintain the application via ‘actions’ in the environment associated with the application. The most important part of this process is choosing the name of the application by which it becomes publicly available. The naming convention is <application>.elasticbeanstalk.com, for instance, the application myApplication would be accessed over the Internet as myapplication.elasticbeanstalk.com. You can actually choose any name you like as long as it is unique in the domain elasticbeanstalk.com. Of course, this limits the choice of the application name, but ideally you would run the service in your own DNS domain.

The last but third step which is hardly describe anywhere is to make your application available under your own fully qualified domain name, for instance, www.myapplication.com (assuming you own the domain myapplication.com). In that case a simple CNAME record in DNS where www.myapplication.com refers to myapplication.beanstalk.com. would suffice.

To summarize application setup in the Elastic Beanstalk:

1. Create/Setup the account for the AWS console and sign up for the Elastic Beanstalk product.
2. Setup your Elastic beanstalk application in the AWS console and upload/deploy the war file that is your website.
3. Create a CNAME record in your DNS name referring to the beanstalk application.