Setup AWS Elastic Beanstalk

This article is related to talk I gave 15th of November 2016 at LRUG (CodeNode Skills Matters London)

It will show you how to set up AWS products for demo application which source code can be found here: https://github.com/equivalent/docker_rails_aws_elasticbeanstalk_demmo_app

Lading page

Create an account and Log in to https://aws.amazon.com/

Step 1 - Generate SSH key

Go to EC2 product and generate SSH private key via EC2 Key Pair tool. This will be need for our EC2 instances once they are runnig so that we can SSH to them.

Generate ssh key via Key Pair tool 1

Be sure to save the ssh private key (Puppies.pem) to a sefe place. You will need it in a futer to ssh to the servers.

Step 2 - Step 2 - Testing Security Group

This step is optional if you know what you are doing.

AWS Security Groups are basically firewall rules that disable everything by default. We will create a Dummy Testing Security Group called “test-liberal” to allow all ports from all IPs (just for Demo)

Now please be sure you you set up correct firewall rules for a real app once you’re done. (e.g. only inbound ports that are needed for given service, ssh only from your IP, …)

Security Groups

Step 3 - Create RDS database

Now we will set up our PostgreSQL database via AWS RDS product.

RDS setup 1 RDS setup 2 RDS setup 3

Choos database username, password and instance type.

We are choosing micro instance as it’s cheaper, but if you are doing this for a real product I would recommend m3.medium for medium size project.

You can read about different types of instances here https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

RDS setup 4

Be sure o use our test-liberal security group.

RDS setup 5 RDS setup 6

Later on we will use this “Endpoint URL” via Enviroment Variables ENV['REL_DATABASE_HOST'] in our Rails app.

Step 4 - Create ElasticCache Redis cluster

Same as in RDS setup be sure to use our test-liberal security group and we will use the endpoint url as ENV['REDIS_HOST'].

ES setup 1 ES setup 2 ES setup 3

Step 5 - Create ElasticBeanstalk Environment

AWS EB setup 01 AWS EB setup 02

We want to use WebServer Environment.

In our demo app even the BG worker Docker container will be running as part of it. Feel free to extract BG worker to own environment if you choose so.

AWS EB setup 03

We want to demonstrate the loadbalanced enviroment -> we can introduce more EC2 instances if load is higher.

AWS EB setup 04

You can use “Sample Application” which is just a Dummy Application from AWS EleasticBeanstalk. But you can choose to upload the Dockerrun.aws.json to it which will basically deploy or demmo application

AWS EB setup 05

In future you can point your real domain (e.g. www.pupies.com) to this elastic beanstalk URL via CNAME rule.

AWS EB setup 06

You don’t need to create RDS, we just done it in prev. step.

AWS EB setup 07

Choose our key pair from step 1. ElasitcBeanstalk will configure EC2 instances so that all current and even newly introduced will have our SSH Key.

Health Check is also important. Be sure to pint it to url that responds with non error status code (so something that responds 200). this is needed as LoadBalancer will not direct responses to your EC2 instance if they are not “healthy” (if they don’t respond to healthcheck endpoint requests)