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Deploy a Sample Web Application in the Free Usage Tier
There are many ways you can get your applications up and running using AWS. If you have a Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, or Ruby application and you want to deploy and manage your application quickly without manually creating the necessary AWS infrastructure, you can use AWS Elastic Beanstalk. You simply upload your application, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring. AWS Elastic Beanstalk reduces management complexity without restricting choice or control.
This section explains how to use the AWS Management Console to create a new AWS Elastic Beanstalk application and deploy the application version to a new environment.
Step 1: Create an Application
To demonstrate how AWS Elastic Beanstalk works, we’ll create and deploy a sample application. This application will run within the AWS free usage tier. For more information about the AWS free usage tier, see http://aws.amazon.com/free/. To check if you are eligible for the AWS free usage tier, see Am I Eligible?.
To create and deploy a sample application
Open the AWS Elastic Beanstalk console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/.
Select an icon from the list of available platform choices, and then click Start.
To begin the creating the necessary components to run the sample application on AWS resources, AWS Elastic Beanstalk does the following:
Creates an AWS Elastic Beanstalk application named "My First Elastic Beanstalk Application."
Creates a new application version labeled "Initial Version" that refers to a default sample application file.
Launches an environment named "Default-Environment" that provisions the AWS resources to host the application.
Deploys the "Initial Version" application into the newly created "Default-Environment."
This process may take several minutes to complete.
Step 2: View Application
After you have launched your application, the details and environment for the application appear in the AWS Management Console. The Application Details pane provides basic overview information about your application, including events associated with the application and all versions of the application.
The Environment pane displays information about the Amazon EC2
instances that host your application, along with the AWS resources that AWS Elastic Beanstalk provisions
when it launches your environment. While AWS Elastic Beanstalk is creating your AWS resources and
launching your application, the environment state will be Launching. Status
messages about launch events are displayed on the environment's information bar.
Step 3: Change Configuration
You can customize your environment to receive email notifications about important events for your application.
Some configuration changes are simple and happen quickly. Others require that AWS Elastic Beanstalk delete and re-create AWS resources, which can take several minutes. AWS Elastic Beanstalk will warn you about possible application downtime before it changes configuration settings.
For this example, you will add your email address to receive event notifications.
To change your environment configuration
In the Environment pane, on the Actions menu, click Edit/Load Configuration.
In the Edit Configuration dialog box, click the Notifications tab.
In the Email Address box, type your email address.
Click Apply Changes.
Wait for the environment's status to change from Latest Event: Created SNS Notification Topic to Successfully running, and then view your application as you did in Step 2: View Application.
Congratulations! You've deployed and made changes to your first sample application using AWS Elastic Beanstalk in the free usage tier.
How AWS Elastic Beanstalk Works
AWS Elastic Beanstalk uses highly reliable and scalable services, which are available in the free usage tier such as:
For an introduction to some of the key services list above and why they are important, go to Getting Started Guide: AWS Computing Basics for Windows.
You can also directly perform most deployment tasks, such as changing the size of your fleet of Amazon EC2 instances or monitoring your application, from the AWS Elastic Beanstalk web interface. For more information about AWS Elastic Beanstalk go to Changing Environment Configurations Settings in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide. By default, AWS Elastic Beanstalk uses the following settings to fit within the free usage tier:
One t1.micro Amazon EC2 instance. You can control the number of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that are running at any time by setting the minimum and maximum number of instances for your Auto Scaling group. By default, the minimum is set to one and the maximum is set to four. If you want to ensure that you have only one instance running at any given time, you can set both the minimum and maximum to one. You can also specify the type of instance you want to run. By default, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is configured to run a t1.micro instance. You can run one t1.micro instance nonstop each month for free within the free usage tier.
Two Amazon CloudWatch alarms and five metrics. You can add up to 10 alarms and 10 basic metrics (at five-minute intervals) within the free usage tier.
One Elastic Load Balancer. You can run an Elastic Load Balancer for up to 750 hours per month, which is more than enough to run one load balancer nonstop for one month. The free usage tier covers up to 15 GB of data processed by the load balancer, which will accommodate most small applications. The amount of data processed is dependent on the amount of traffic that hits your site.
SNS email notification. By default, no email address is configured to receive email notifications when events happen; however, you can configure an email address as described in Step 3: Change Configuration, and you can then receive up to 1000 free email notifications each month.
One Amazon S3 bucket. AWS Elastic Beanstalk creates an Amazon S3 bucket to store your application software. You can also choose to copy log files on an hourly basis to your Amazon S3 bucket, but by default, this capability is disabled. To ensure that you stay within the limits of the free usage tier, ensure that your storage, PUT, and GET requests do not exceed the limits. You can use up to 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 2,000 PUT requests, and 20,000 GET requests.
For more information about account activity usage for AWS Elastic Beanstalk, see the next section, Tracking Usage of Your AWS Resources. To learn how to clean up your AWS resources that the sample application uses, go to Clean Up Your AWS Resources. Freeing up computing resources within the free usage tier enables you to use those resources to run an application of your own.
