2016-10-16

Deployed first site to Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

It is a single environment to manage DB, site, firewall, load balancer,... cool stuff. But also quite useful. Need to organize the process though, but it is justifiable. Now could replicate environment without many manual steps. I hope the site will grow to the level of need for auto-scale feature in Beanstalk.

In competitive stacks with automatic scaling given by Heroku or Google Apps Engine there is a huge gap in supported frameworks. The decent CMS is almost impossible to configure and support by night-time project owner there. Unlike others Amazon made a classic LAMP available out of the box. Well, almost: for complete Drupal app I still need to:

  1. add DB in RDS, open access to my IP in security group, create schema 
  2. install app, create key pair for ssh access, open ssh access to my IP in site security group, 
  3. adjust .htaccess zip and download application folder. This archive content is now a primary deployment unit. For convenience it will be placed in git repo. 
My wish to Amazon folks: with covering the steps above you will completely reach the declared goal of creating the ready-to-use complex site like CMS with a push of a button. Just make a GIT repo for each app type and have the process started with a git fork and finished with running app. 

Another wish: make a DNS server( or configure /etc/hosts in each instance) a part of BeanStalk so entries like "dbhost" could be used inside of instances and configured as part of sub-cloud without ever need to know what is ec2-123-45-678-8.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com means.