Using Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon RDS
AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides support for running Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
If you haven't used a DB instance with your application before, try adding one to a test environment with the Elastic Beanstalk console first. This lets you verify that your application is able to read environment properties, construct a connection string, and connect to a DB instance before you add Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and security group configuration to the mix. See Adding a database to your Elastic Beanstalk environment for details.
To decouple your database instance from your environment, you can run a database instance
in Amazon RDS and configure your application to connect to it on
launch. This enables you to connect multiple environments to a database, terminate
an environment without affecting the database, and perform seamless
updates with blue-green deployments. For a detailed procedure, see How do I decouple an Amazon RDS instance from an Elastic Beanstalk environment without
downtime, database sync issues, or data loss?
To allow the Amazon EC2 instances in your environment to connect to an outside database, you can configure the environment's Auto Scaling group with an additional security group. The security group that you attach to your environment can be the same one that is attached to your database instance, or a separate security group from which the database's security group allows ingress.
You can connect your environment to a database by adding a rule to your database's security group that allows ingress from the autogenerated security group that Elastic Beanstalk attaches to your environment's Auto Scaling group. However, doing so creates a dependency between the two security groups. Subsequently, when you attempt to terminate the environment, Elastic Beanstalk will be unable to delete the environment's security group because the database's security group is dependent on it.
After launching your database instance and configuring security groups, you can pass the connection information (endpoint, password, etc.) to your application by using environment properties. This is the same mechanism that Elastic Beanstalk uses when you run a database instance in your environment.
For additional security, you can store your connection information in Amazon S3, and configure Elastic Beanstalk to retrieve it during deployment. With configuration files (.ebextensions), you can configure the instances in your environment to securely retrieve files from Amazon S3 when you deploy your application.
Topics
Cleaning up an external Amazon RDS instance
When you connect an external Amazon RDS instance to your Elastic Beanstalk environment, the database instance isn't tied to your environment's lifecycle, and isn't deleted when you terminate your environment. To ensure that personal information that you might have stored in the database instance isn't unnecessarily retained, delete any records that you don't need anymore, or delete the database instance.
