Distributed Systems Practice Notes

Cloud Web Apps - Deploy a Node.js web app using Elastic Beanstalk

October 16, 2018

This tutorial is about how to set up an Elastic Beanstalk environment, and how to deploy a Node.js web app in that environment. At last, we will try to configure a high availability environment by setting the minimum instance amount to 2, which is more than easy.

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Prerequisites

Authorization to create elastic beanstalk app, see Piazza, use your own aws console account rather than the education account.

Official Links

AWS Tutorial: Deploy a Scalable Node.js Web App

Operations

1. Create Elastic Beanstalk App and Launch

  • Choose Platform as Node.js create1

  • Choose Application code as Sample application

  • Create app and Launch, it should look like below, create1

  • In 5 minutes, Elastic Beanstalk creates the environment with the following resources,

    • EC2 instance
    • Instance security group
    • Load balancer
    • Load balancer security group
    • Auto Scaling group
    • Amazon S3 bucket
    • Amazon CloudWatch alarms
    • AWS CloudFormation stack
    • Domain name

2. Add Permissions to Your Environment’s Instances

  • Open the Roles page in the IAM console.

  • Choose aws-elasticbeanstalk-ec2-role

  • Attach Policies

    • AmazonSNSFullAccess
    • AmazonDynamoDBFullAccess

attach

3. Deploy the Sample Application

  • Download the source bundle from Github
  • Open the Elastic Beanstalk console
  • Choose Upload and Deploy, select the source bundle

deploy

4. Create a DynamoDB Table outside Elastic Beanstalk

  • Table name: nodejs-tutorial
  • Primary key: email
  • Primary key type: String

5. Update the Application’s Configuration Files

  • Unzip the source file bundle

  • Open .ebextensions/options.config and change the values of the following settings:

    • NewSignupEmail: YOUR EMAIL
    • STARTUP-SIGNUP-TABLE: nodejs-tutorial

This configures the application to use the nodejs-tutorial table instead of the one created by .ebextensions/create-dynamodb-table.config, and sets the email address that the Amazon SNS topic uses for notifications.

  • Remove .ebextensions/create-dynamodb-table.config, so that the next time you deploy the application, the table created by this configuration file will be deleted
~/nodejs-tutorial$ rm .ebextensions/create-dynamodb-table.config
  • Zip the modified source bundle and deploy again

6.Configure Your Environment for High Availability

  • Open the Elastic Beanstalk console
  • Choose Configuration
  • On the Capacity configuration card, choose Modify
  • In the Auto Scaling Group section, set Min instances to 2.

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7. Cleanup

  • Open the Elastic Beanstalk console
  • Choose Actions, and then choose Terminate Environment
  • Delete DynamoDB table nodejs-tutorial
Warren

Written by Warren who studies distributed systems at George Washington University. You might wanna follow him on Github