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I'm still looking for a way to deploy with Elastic Beanstalk without causing a brief interruption in service. It seems like a major oversight in the system it p

by robbles 12y ago

I'm still looking for a way to deploy with Elastic Beanstalk without causing a brief interruption in service. It seems like a major oversight in the system it provides. I know you can do the CNAME swap trick, but that cause monitoring issues due to essentially switching between groups of servers, plus you have to run twice as many servers. Since you've had some experience with advanced configuration of EB apps, have you run into any convenient trick for doing this?

keithgrennan 12y ago
I agree this is the EB's biggest missing feature. I do it by having a second environment running the same web app. Before deploying I add nodes from this 'reserve' env to the ELB of the main env, and remove all the nodes-to-be-deployed from the main load balancer. Then I deploy the app. When deploy is complete and prod nodes are ready I add them back to the ELB and remove the reserve nodes. The deployment is seamless but this is not a convenient trick - it required a fair bit of custom scripting... Luckily AWS provides great APIs to make all this stuff possible.
toomuchtodo 12y ago
Elastic Beanstalk does have rolling updates, but unfortunately its for environment changes, not application version changes. Our developers are fond of the Elastic Beanstalk interface; to switch between app versions without end-user disruption, I have logic that directly manipulates instance state and uses connection draining (both ELB functions) to cycle new clients to the fresh cluster while not disrupting existing clients. We don't run twice as many servers; before we switch between groups of servers, we scale up the destination cluster, and after the switch scale down the stale cluster with the old app version (2 is the minimum for load balanced applications unfortunately). My email is in my profile; feel free to get in touch, I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.

by robbles 12y ago

keithgrennan 12y ago

I agree this is the EB's biggest missing feature. I do it by having a second environment running the same web app. Before deploying I add nodes from this 'reserve' env to the ELB of the main env, and remove all the nodes-to-be-deployed from the main load balancer. Then I deploy the app. When deploy is complete and prod nodes are ready I add them back to the ELB and remove the reserve nodes. The deployment is seamless but this is not a convenient trick - it required a fair bit of custom scripting... Luckily AWS provides great APIs to make all this stuff possible.

toomuchtodo 12y ago

Elastic Beanstalk does have rolling updates, but unfortunately its for environment changes, not application version changes. Our developers are fond of the Elastic Beanstalk interface; to switch between app versions without end-user disruption, I have logic that directly manipulates instance state and uses connection draining (both ELB functions) to cycle new clients to the fresh cluster while not disrupting existing clients. We don't run twice as many servers; before we switch between groups of servers, we scale up the destination cluster, and after the switch scale down the stale cluster with the old app version (2 is the minimum for load balanced applications unfortunately). My email is in my profile; feel free to get in touch, I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.