Deploying an ASP.NET Core Application to Elastic Beanstalk (Legacy) - AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio

Deploying an ASP.NET Core Application to Elastic Beanstalk (Legacy)

Important

This documentation refers to legacy services and features. For updated guides and content, see the AWS .NET deployment tool guide and the updated Deploying to AWS table of contents.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service that simplifies the process of provisioning AWS resources for your application. AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides all of the AWS infrastructure required to deploy your application.

The Toolkit for Visual Studio supports deploying ASP.NET Core applications to AWS using Elastic Beanstalk. ASP.NET Core is the redesign of ASP.NET with a modularized architecture that minimizes dependency overhead and streamlines your application to run in the cloud.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk makes it easy to deploy applications in a variety of different languages to AWS. Elastic Beanstalk supports both traditional ASP.NET applications and ASP.NET Core applications. This topic describes deploying ASP.NET Core applications.

Using the Deployment Wizard

The easiest way to deploy ASP.NET Core applications to Elastic Beanstalk is with the Toolkit for Visual Studio.

If you have used the toolkit before to deploy traditional ASP. NET applications, you'll find the experience for ASP.NET Core to be very similar. In the steps below, we'll walk through the deployment experience.

If you have never used the toolkit before, the first thing you'll need to do after installing the toolkit is register your AWS credentials with the toolkit. See How to Specify the AWS Security Credentials for Your Application for Visual Studio documentation for details on how to do so.

To deploy an ASP.NET Core web application, right-click the project in the Solution Explorer and select Publish to AWS….

On the first page of the Publish to AWS Elastic Beanstalk deployment wizard, choose to create a new Elastic Beanstalk application. An Elastic Beanstalk application is a logical collection of Elastic Beanstalk components, including environments, versions, and environment configurations. The deployment wizard generates an application that in turn contains a collection of application versions and environments. The environments contain the actual AWS resources that run an application version. Every time you deploy an application, a new application version is created and the wizard points the environment to that version. You can learn more about these concepts in Elastic Beanstalk Components..

Next, set names for the application and its first environment. Each environment has a unique CNAME associated with it that you can use to access the application when the deployment is complete.

The next page, AWS Options, allows you to configure the type of AWS resources to use. For this example, leave the default values, except for the Key pair section. Key pairs allow you retrieve the Windows administrator password so you can log on to the machine. If you haven't already created a key pair you might want to select Create new key pair.

Permissions

The Permissions page is used for assigning AWS credentials to the EC2 instances running your application. This is important if your application uses the AWS SDK for .NET to access other AWS services. If you are not using any other services from your application then you can leave this page at its default.

Application Options

The details on the Application Options page are different from those specified when deploying traditional ASP.NET applications. Here, you specify the build configuration and framework used to package the application, and also specify the IIS resource path for the application.

After completing the Application Options page, click Next to review the settings, then click Deploy to begin the deployment process.

Checking Environment Status

After the application is packaged and uploaded to AWS, you can check the status of the Elastic Beanstalk environment by opening the environment status view from the AWS Explorer in Visual Studio.

Events are displayed in the status bar as the environment is coming online. Once everything is complete, the environment status will move to healthy state. You can click on the URL to view the site. From here, you can also pull the logs from the environment or remote desktop into the Amazon EC2 instances that are part of your Elastic Beanstalk environment.

The first deployment of any application will take a bit longer than subsequent re-deployments, as it creates new AWS resources. As you iterate on your application during development, you can quickly re-deploy by going back through the wizard, or selecting the Republish option when you right click the project.

Republish packages your application using the settings from the previous run through the deployment wizard and uploads the application bundle to the existing Elastic Beanstalk environment.