hands-on lab

Run a Controlled Deploy With AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Difficulty: Intermediate
Duration: Up to 2 hours and 10 minutes
Students: 10,071
Rating: 4.7/5
Get guided in a real environmentPractice with a step-by-step scenario in a real, provisioned environment.
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Description

Lab Overview

One of the highest risk parts of running a software company, in terms of availability concerns, is the risk of a faulty deployment. During deployments, complex systems with multiple parts are actively moving around the delicate parts of many other systems. Deployment risk can be minimized by studying a couple of common approaches to deploying code to running machines. 

In this lab, you will deploy multiple version updates of an application in a load-balanced and auto-scaled environment. The first update is deployed using a simple, low-friction rolling deployment. The second update is deployed using a blue-green deployment where a separate environment is created to run the new version of the application and a DNS cutover switches incoming traffic to the new environment.

Lab Objectives

Upon completion of this lab, you will be able to:

  • Build Elastic Beanstalk applications and environments
  • Perform rolling deployments on underlying EC2 resources
  • Perform blue-green deployments with Elastic Beanstalk for zero-downtime updates
  • Minimize costs by cleaning up after blue-green deploys

Lab Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

Lab Environment

Before completing the lab instructions, the environment will look as follows:

After completing the lab instructions, the environment should look similar to:

Updates

April 25th, 2023 - Updated the instructions and screenshot to reflect the latest UI

April 21st, 2023 - Resolved Elastic Beanstalk app creation error

April 5th, 2023 - Added note regarding todo notes

March 27th, 2023 - Resolved Elastic Beanstalk app & environment creation error 

March 6th, 2023 - Updated network settings for AWS Elastic Beanstalk application

January 19th, 2023 - Added screenshot to support instructions

July 18th, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

June 23rd, 2021 - Provided warning label for EB application creation lab step and updated any ambiguous screenshot associated

May 10th, 2021 - Resolved an issue where the AWS console stalled creating the Elastic Beanstalk service role

February 12th. 2021 - Updated the lab to resolve a permission issue

February 9th, 2021 - Added lab step explaining cost considerations

January 29th, 2021 - Update instructions to handle options being greyed out until page is refreshed

June 1st, 2020 - Fix an issue causing v3 of the app to fail to deploy correctly

May 29th, 2020 - Updated some screenshots to account for an updated Beanstalk UI

May 26th, 2020 - Updated the Node.js deployment packages to allow for successful deployments to AWS Beanstalk

April 10th, 2020 - Updated the instructions and screenshots due to the new Elastic Beanstalk UI

October 17th, 2019 - Updated the creation of the environment instructions

July 19th, 2019 - Improved the validation lab Step to further check the work you perform in the lab

January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation lab Step to check the work you perform in the lab

October 17th, 2018 - Adapted the lab to use an Application Load Balancer (the new default) rather than a Classic Load Balancer

September 6th, 2018 - Improved instructions clarity and updated screenshots to the most recent Elastic Beanstalk interface

April 29th, 2018 - Complete update (easier to follow instructions and screenshots for the new Elastic Beanstalk UI)

Covered topics

Lab steps

Logging In to the Amazon Web Services Console
Creating an Elastic Beanstalk App & Environment
Running a Rolling Deploy
Preparing a Blue-Green Deploy
Performing a DNS Swap
Cleaning Up Old Resources