Eclipse Deployment: Part 2 – Deploying to AWS Elastic Beanstalk

In this three part series, we’ll show how easy it is to deploy a Java web application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk using the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse.

In part one of this series, we showed how to create an AWS Java Web Project and deploy it to a local Tomcat server. This is a great workflow for developing your project, but when you’re ready for production, you’ll want to get it running on AWS. In this second post of the series, we’ll show how we can use the same tools in Eclipse to deploy our project using AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides a managed application container environment for your application to run in. That means all you have to worry about is your application code. Elastic Beanstalk handles the provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring for you. Even though Elastic Beanstalk handles all these aspects for you, you still have control over all the settings, as we’ll see in the next part of this series, if you do want to customize how your environment runs.

The AWS Toolkit for Eclipse supports deploying Java web apps to Elastic Beanstalk Tomcat containers, but Elastic Beanstalk supports many other types of applications, including:

• .NET
• Ruby
• Python
• PHP
• Node.js

Let’s go ahead and see how easy it is to deploy our application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk. We’ll use the same workflow as before when we deployed our application to our local Tomcat server for local development and testing, but this time, we’ll select to create a new AWS Elastic Beanstalk Tomcat 7 server.

Right-click on your project and select Run As -> Run on Server, then make sure the Manually define a new server option is selected; otherwise, this wizard will only show you any existing servers you’ve configured. Select Elastic Beanstalk for Tomcat 7 from the Amazon Web Services category and move on to the next page in the wizard.

This page asks for some very basic information about the Elastic Beanstalk environment that we’re creating. Every Elastic Beanstalk environment is tied to a specific application, and of course has a name. You can choose to create a new application, or reuse an existing one. Whenever you deploy your project to this environment, you’ll be creating a new version of that application, and then deploying that new version to run in your environment.

On the next page of the wizard are some more options for configuring your new environment. We’ll go over these options and more in the next post in this series.

Go ahead and click the Finish button and Eclipse will start creating your new environment. The very first time you start your environment you’ll need to wait a few minutes while Elastic Beanstalk provisions servers for you, configures them behind a load balancer and auto-scaling group, and deploys your application. Future deployments should go much faster, but Elastic Beanstalk needs to set up several pieces of infrastructure for you the first time a new environment starts up. To see more details about what Elastic Beanstalk is doing to set up your environment, double-click on the server you just created in Eclipse’s Servers view, and open the Events tab in the server editor that opens. The event log shows you all the major events that Elastic Beanstalk is logging for your environment. If you ever have problems starting up your environment, the event log is the place to start looking for clues.

After a few minutes, you should see your application start up in Eclipse’s internal web browser, this time running from AWS instead of a local Tomcat server.

And that’s all it takes to get a Java web application deployed to AWS using AWS Elastic Beanstalk and the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse.

Now that you’ve got your environment running, try making a few small changes to your application and redeploying them, using the same tools as before. Once you get your application code set up, you’ll switch over to incremental deployments and should get very fast redeploys.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series, where we’ll explain how you can customize your environment’s configuration to control different aspects of how it runs.