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:

• Basic Amazon EC2 and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) concepts
• The topics covered in the Advanced Deployment Techniques on AWS course are beneficial, but not required

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)