Task 1: Accessing Elastic Beanstalk Environment
Step 1: Open Vocareum -> Click on the lab -> My Work -> Start Lab. A pop-up window will appear and when it says, “Lab status: ready”, close the window -> Click on AWS tab on top right navigation bar.
Step 2: Click on “Services” -> Select “Elastic Beanstalk” -> Under “Environment name” click on the name of environment. The Dashboard for that environment opens.
Step 3: Copy the link near the top of the page -> Open a new web browser and paste the link. You will see an error message. This happens because there is no application in the application server.
Task 2: Deploying a sample application to Elastic Beanstalk
Step 1: Download the sample application through the link provided in the lab instructions.
Step 2: Go to Elastic Beanstalk Dashboard -> Click on “Upload and Deploy” -> Click on “Browse or Choose file” -> Open the file we downloaded from the link. -> Click on “Deploy”. Once the deployment is complete, copy and paste the Elastic beanstalk URL on top of page to a new browser tab. We will now be able to see the web application that we deployed.
Step 3: Go to Elastic Beanstalk console -> Click on “Configuration” on the left panel -> Scroll down to the bottom of page until you see “Database” row. -> Click on “Edit”. If we want to add database, we can configure and apply it here. -> Click on “Monitoring” to show the information that are available to us.
Task 3: Exploring AWS resources that support the application
Step 1: Click on “Services” -> Select “EC2” -> Click on “Instances”. We can see that both instances have “samp” in their names which shows that they support the web application.
Step 2: We can also check the security group which has port 80 open, load balancer having both instances, etc., which shows that they were created by Elastic Beanstalk to support them.
Reflection
In this activity, I learned how to how to deploy code into the Elastic Beanstalk and observed what AWS resources are being used in the Elastic Beanstalk environment.
First, I went to the Elastic Beanstalk environment to check if the condition is healthy so that we can deploy the code, then I copied the URL at the top of the page which I pasted in the web browser. But it displayed an error. Then I downloaded the file which was suggested in the lab instructions and I uploaded it and deployed it. After the deployment was complete, I went to the URL in the web browser again and I found that it was displaying the application.
I went back to Elastic Beanstalk console and I learned how to add database and how to monitor the information that are provided by Beanstalk by following the instructions from the guide. The last task for the activity was to find out the resources that were supporting the application in the Elastic Beanstalk environment. When I went to EC2 Instances, there are 2 instances that had samp on their names which shows that they were supporting the application. Also, the security group had port 80 open, the load balancers had both the instances in it, etc. These are the minimum requirements for the web application which is why all these resources are created by Elastic Beanstalk. Elastic Beanstalk is an excellent service because it allows Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling which are helpful for balancing the workloads and scaling them. It also allows CloudWatch to use tools that can be used to monitor the health status of the applications that are deployed. This can help the users get notified in case if the health condition of an application is in alert.
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