AWS Elastic Beanstalk Introduces Managed Platform Updates
You can now choose to have your AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments automatically update to the latest version of the underlying platform running your application during a specified maintenance window. Elastic Beanstalk regularly releases new versions of supported platforms (i.e., Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python, .NET, Go, and Docker) with operating system, web & application server, and language & framework updates. Previously, you had to manually initiate updates to your Elastic Beanstalk environments using the Elastic Beanstalk console, command line interface (CLI), or API. Now, you can simply select a weekly maintenance window and have Elastic Beanstalk automatically update the platform version of your environment during that window.
With managed platform updates, you no longer have to worry about keeping up with new patches or updates for the platform running your application. Elastic Beanstalk performs updates in a safe manner so that your end users are minimally impacted. The updates use an immutable deployment mechanism. This ensures that Elastic Beanstalk provisions a parallel fleet of Amazon EC2 instances with the updates installed before swapping out and terminating the existing instances. Elastic Beanstalk redirects traffic to the existing fleet of instances if the Elastic Beanstalk health system detects any issues during the update, ensuring minimal impact to end users of your application.
Elastic Beanstalk can automatically perform platform updates for new patch and minor platform versions. You can schedule different maintenance windows for each of your environments. You can also initiate updates outside of the regularly scheduled maintenance window that you set. Elastic Beanstalk will not automatically perform major platform version updates (e.g. Java 7 Tomcat 7 to Java 8 Tomcat 8) because they include backwards incompatible changes and require additional testing. In these cases, you must manually initiate the update.
To get started, you must enable managed platform updates in the configuration tab of the Elastic Beanstalk console or use the EB CLI or API. Learn more about managed platform updates in our documentation or read the FAQs.
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