Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast!
Every week we gather here to talk about something new and inspire our listeners to get learning. Every week we receive all your amazing feedback and suggestions that drives us to keep going, bringing you one more interesting episode after another. So, thank you to all our awesome listeners all over the world.
This week, we talk about a very important service in the Amazon Web Services universe – the AWS Elastic Beanstalk. We will talk about what is AWS Elastic Beanstalk, what it is used for, and what are the benefits of using Elastic Beanstalk, you get the drift, right? So, let’s get started!
What is the AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
The AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service from Amazon Web Services for deploying and scaling the web applications & services that are developed using Java, .Net, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers like Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.
With AWS Elastic Beanstalk, all one needs to do is upload their code and then the Elastic Beanstalk would automatically step in to handle the complete deployment process – from capacity provisioning and load balancing to auto-scaling and application health monitoring. While this happens, you still get to retain complete control over the AWS resources that are powering your application, so you can access any of the underlying resources at any time. Moreover, when you subscribe to the AWS resources, the AWS Elastic Beanstalk comes bundled in the package, so there are no extra charges for using this service.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is undoubtedly the fastest way to get web applications up and running on AWS. If you are working with a PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, Node.js, .NET, Go, or Docker web application, then AWS Elastic Beanstalk should be a preferred option for you.
At its core, the AWS Elastic Beanstalk uses the core AWS services such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or the Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) for supporting applications to scale them up for handling traffic from millions of users spread across geographies.
Now, let us talk about some of the top features of AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
First, AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports applications written in a very wide selection of programming & scripting languages as well as frameworks.
Second, AWS Elastic Beanstalk requires minimal to no code changes to go from the development machine to the cloud, it is that easy.
Third, AWS Elastic Beanstalk offers options to deploy your code through a wide variety of options, including the AWS Management Console, Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface, Visual Studio, and Eclipse.
Fourth, the AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports multiple deployment policies. So you could have an all-at-once policy, a rolling policy, a rolling with an additional batch policy, an immutable policy, or a blue/green one – you can get umpteen choices for speed and safety of application deployment without shooting up your administrative burdens.
Fifth, the AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides users with a unified user interface (UI) for monitoring and managing the health of their applications. It collects more than 40 key metrics around the application’s health, presenting you with valuable data to help you make the right, informed decisions. Moreover, AWS Elastic Beanstalk comes integrated with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray, which enables the usage of dashboards for monitoring key performance indicators like latency, CPU utilization, response codes, etc.
Sixth, AWS Elastic Beanstalk comes with the Managed Platform Updates engine through which you can get the latest updates and security patches for the Elastic Beanstalk. There is also an immutable deployment mechanism that ensures that all these updates and patches get installed and implemented safely.
Seventh, the Elastic Load Balancing and the Auto Scaling services that come bundled along with the Elastic Beanstalk ensure that you can scale up and scale down your application based on needs and demands across multiple availability zones with ease.
Eighth, AWS Elastic Beanstalk gives you the freedom to pick AWS resources like the Amazon EC2 instance types which would work best for your application, while also giving you complete control over all the AWS resources which power your application.
Ninth, when operating across multiple availability zones, managing compliances can be a nightmare, but not with the AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It meets the criteria for ISO, PCI, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 as well as those for HIPAA eligibility. What more could you ask for?
Last, but not least, AWS Elastic Beanstalk also comes with the powerful AWS Graviton arm64-based processor support for optimized workloads and best price performance.
That’s a lot of features for one service, isn’t it? Well, that’s AWS Elastic Beanstalk, power-packed through and through. So, you can understand why everybody keeps talking about it, right?
Let’s quickly go over the key benefits offered by AWS Elastic Beanstalk now, shall we?
First and foremost, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is fast and simple to use, we mean it when we say it is the fastest and the simplest way to deploy your applications on AWS. You could very easily use the AWS Management Console or your Git Repository or an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to upload the code and let the Elastic Beanstalk manage all the rest.
Second, the AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a blessing for developer productivity. It provisions and operates the infrastructure as well as manages the application stack for you. Due to this, the developers don’t have to spend their time or skills on developing this, it is already taken care of by AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
Third, try as you may, you simply cannot outgrow the AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It will scale your application up and down along with your application’s specific needs and requirements. AWS Elastic Beanstalk comes with Auto Scaling so there is full flexibility and scalability built in.
Fourth, and quite important, AWS Elastic Beanstalk gives you complete control over the resources that are powering your application. You not only get the freedom to choose which resources you would like to use but also which processor type you want to run the workload on, based on what would be optimal for your application.
When we look at all these facts, we can understand why AWS Cloud Computing and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, in particular, have been extremely useful for some of the most known brands in the world like Zillow, Prezi, JellyButton Games, BMW, Crowd Chat, Samsung Business, etc., right?
So, that’s the primer on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Now you know what is AWS Elastic Beanstalk, what it does, what are its most important features, and what are its key benefits. You can bookmark or save this episode, as it would be very useful when you are preparing for an interview or an exam, and you can always revisit it to refresh the information.
With that, we come to the end of this week’s episode of the Cognixia podcast. Thank you for tuning in, we hope you enjoyed listening to us today. Until next week then!
Happy learning, folks!
