Category: How-To

AWS OpsWorks now allows users to define environment variables per application. Instead of creating a custom recipe and managing environment variables as Chef attributes, you define the environment variables on each app and OpsWorks takes care of securely storing and sending the environment variables from your OpsWorks app definition to your instances and adding them […]

A good practice for maintaining highly available applications is to monitor the metrics that impact performance and service levels. AWS OpsWorks includes built-in integration with 14 Amazon CloudWatch metrics, including load, CPU and memory, but you may also want to monitor other metrics such as disk space utilization or application-level metrics such as error rates. […]

Background AWS CloudFormation simplifies provisioning and management on AWS. You can templatize the service and application architectures you want, and have CloudFormation use the templates for quick and reliable provisioning of the services or applications as ‘stacks’. You can also easily update or replicate the stacks as needed. Inside the CloudFormation templates, you can configure the […]

It is often useful to be able to store log files in a central place for easy access and reporting. Amazon CloudWatch Logs is a new service that is designed to help you monitor, store, and access your system, application, and custom log files from Amazon EC2 instances. For example, you can monitor application logs […]

Today’s guest post is by Charlie Crawford, a developer on the Elastic Beanstalk team. The Puma Ruby 2 container has a built-in feature to detect locally installed gems. This feature is easy to use, ensures that your production environment is using the same gems as your development environment, and helps your application deploy faster. Although this […]

A few weeks ago Elastic Beanstalk announced support for deploying and managing Docker containers in the AWS cloud. In this post we’ll walk through Dockerizing a simple signup form web app originally written for the Elastic Beanstalk Python environment. About the Signup Form App We built and blogged about this app a few months ago. […]

There are a number of ways to customize Amazon EC2 instances using AWS OpsWorks. In a previous blog we demonstrated some easy ways to customize OpsWorks by writing your own recipes. In this blog we’re going to show how to use Chef attributes to customize recipes. Chef attributes are input parameters to Chef recipes. The […]

Today’s guest post is from Jebran Syed, a developer on the Elastic Beanstalk team. AWS Elastic Beanstalk has a new feature that allows users to quickly deploy a new application with just a few clicks. You can now create a hyperlink that includes applicationName and solutionStackName parameters in the URL and Elastic Beanstalk will do […]

You can enable Cross-Zone Load Balancing for your Elastic Beanstalk Environment in 3 quick steps: Create a directory named .ebextensions at the top level of your application source bundle Add a file named elb_cross_zone.config with the following content: Resources: AWSEBLoadBalancer: Type: AWS::ElasticLoadBalancing::LoadBalancer Properties: CrossZone: True Bundle and deploy your application. You can refer to the […]

AWS OpsWorks is an application management service that makes it easy to deploy and operate applications of all shapes and sizes. OpsWorks uses Chef to install and configure software on Amazon EC2 instances and lets you automate any task that can be scripted. In this blog post, we will show a step-by-step example for how […]