• AWS OpsWorks
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
  • BeansTalk CLI
  • Concepts
  • Deployments
    • All-at-Once deployments
    • In-Place deployments
    • Rolling deployments
    • Blue/Green deployment
    • Immutable Deployment
• Amazon Lightsail

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks Stacks is a configuration management service that helps you configure and operate applications of all shapes and sizes using Chef.

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate provides a fully managed Chef Automate server
The Chef Automate platform gives you full stack automation by handling operational tasks such as software and operating system configurations, continuous compliance, package installations, database setups, and more.

AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise provides a managed Puppet Enterprise server and suite of automation tools that give you workflow automation for orchestration, automated provisioning, and visualization for traceability

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

It’s a service that you can use to deploy applications, services, and architecture.

It provides provisioned scalability, load balancing, and high availability, using common languages, including Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker, on common-type web servers, such as Apache, NGINX, Passenger, and IIS.

Elastic Beanstalk can launch AWS resources automatically with Route 53, Auto Scaling, ELB, EC2, and RDS instances, and it allows you to customize additional AWS resources.

You can also use Docker containers with Elastic Beanstalk.

You are charged only for the resources you use to run your application.

You can view Elastic Beanstalk stacks in AWS CloudFormation, but always use the Elastic Beanstalk service to make modifications.

BeansTalk CLI

There was a specific EB CLI for BeansTalk, today it has been integrated in the AWS CLI.

--- EB CLI ---
eb create my-env

--- AWS CLI ---
aws elasticbeanstalk check-dns-availability --cname-prefix my-cname

Concepts

• Application: a logical collection of environment variables and components, application versions, and environment configurations.
• Application Versions: iterations of the application’s deployable code, pointing to an Amazon S3 object with the code source package. An application can have many versions, with each version being unique. You can deploy and access any application version at any time.
• Environment: a separate version of the application, each environment runs one application version at a time, but you can run multiple environments, with the same application on each, along with its own customizations and resources.
• Environment Tier: to launch an environment, you must first choose an environment tier, a sort of template (eg: WebServer or a Worker).
• Environment Configuration: You can change your environment to create, modify, delete, or deploy resources and change the settings for each. Your environment configuration saves to a configuration template exclusive to each environment.

Deployments

All-at-Once deployments

An all-at-once deployment applies updates to all your instances at once.

When you execute this strategy, you experience downtime.
An appropriate strategy for simple, immediate update requirements when it’s not critical to have your application always available.

In-Place deployments

AWS CodeDeploy stops currently running applications on the target instance, deploys the latest revision, restarts applications, and validates successful deployment.
In-place deployments can support the automatic configuration of a load balancer.
Available for your platform updates, such as a coding-language platform update for a web server.

Rolling deployments

Applies changes to all of your instances by rolling the updates from one instance to another.
This approach reduces possible downtime during implementation of the change and allows available instances to run while you deploy.
Updates are applied in batches, one after the other.
You might specify a time to wait between health-based updates and checks between batches.
If the rolling update fails, the service begins another rolling update to rollback the previous configuration.

Blue/Green deployment

The running environment is considered the blue environment, and the newer environment with your update is considered the green environment.
When your changes are ready and have gone through all tests in your green environment, you can swap the CNAMEs of the environments to redirect traffic to the newer running environment.
This strategy provides an instantaneous update with typically zero downtime.

Immutable Deployment

Is best when an environment requires a total replacement of instances, rather than updates to an existing part of an infrastructure.
This approach implements a safety feature: EB creates a temporary Auto Scaling group behind your environment’s load balancer to contain the new instances with the updates you apply. If the update fails, the rollback process terminates the Auto Scaling group.
If all instances pass the checks, EB transfers the new configurations to the original Auto Scaling group. After the updates are made, EB deletes the temporary Auto Scaling group of the older instances.

Amazon Lightsail

Provides easy-to-use cloud resources to get your web application or websites up and running in just a few clicks.
Lightsail offers simplified services such as instances, containers, databases, storage, and more.
You can use pre-configured blueprints like WordPress, Prestashop, or LAMP.

The Lightsail console guides you through the configuration process, and in many cases, has components already configured.

Can be used to start using AWS with a super-light approach, with almost no knowledge of how AWS works.