Introduction

If you want to host a simple Drupal website without managing the servers but Amazon Lightsail doesn’t satisfy the needs of your application Elastic Beanstalk might be the perfect solution for you with its horizontal scalability, support for a wider range of languages and applications and the customizability of the underlying infrastructure.

What is Elastic Beanstalk?

Elastic Beanstalk is a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows developers to quickly deploy and manage web applications in a variety of programming languages including Java, Python, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Go, and .NET.

With Elastic Beanstalk, developers can simply upload their application code and Elastic Beanstalk will automatically handle the deployment, scaling, and monitoring of the infrastructure required to run the application. This allows developers to focus on writing code and building their application, rather than worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

Elastic Beanstalk provides an easy-to-use web interface and a command-line interface (CLI) to manage applications. It also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon RDS for database management and Amazon S3 for storage.

In addition, Elastic Beanstalk supports a variety of deployment options, including blue-green deployments, which allow for zero-downtime updates, and can scale automatically based on the application's demand. This helps ensure that the application remains available and responsive, even during periods of high traffic.

Overall, Elastic Beanstalk is a powerful platform that can help developers quickly and easily deploy and manage their web applications, while reducing the complexity and overhead associated with managing infrastructure.

Advantages of Elastic Beanstalk over Lightsail

• Auto-Scaling: Elastic Beanstalk can automatically scale up or down based on the demand of the application, which makes it well-suited for applications with variable traffic patterns.
• Wider range of language and application support: Elastic Beanstalk supports a wider range of applications and languages.
• Customizability: Elastic beanstalk allows developers to customize the underlying infrastructure and configuration to meet specific requirements.
• Integration with more AWS Services: Elastic Beanstalk integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS.

Elastic Beanstalk Concepts

In Elastic Beanstalk there are a few concepts which we need to understand in order to build applications on it.

An application is a logical collection of Elastic Beanstalk components such as environments, versions and environment configurations.

An application version describes a specific, labeled iteration of deployable code for a web application. This points to an S3 object that contains deployable code.

An environment is a collection of AWS resources running in an application version.

The environment tier designates the type of application the environment runs which is either web server or worker.

An environment configuration identifies a collection of parameters and settings that define how an environment and its associated resources behave.

A saved configuration is a template that you can use as a starting point for your environment configuration.

A platform is a combination of the operating system, programming language runtime, application server, web server and Elastic Beanstalk components.

Deploy a high-availability Drupal website to Elastic Beanstalk

First step is to launch an Elastic Beanstalk environment to host your Drupal site. To do this, go to the Elastic Beanstalk console and click "Create a new environment." Choose "Web server environment" as the environment type and select the appropriate platform (e.g., PHP). Then, give your environment a name and choose the appropriate region and availability zones.

After you have launched your Elastic Beanstalk environment, you will need to configure it to run Drupal. The easiest way to do this is to use the AWS Elastic Beanstalk command line interface (CLI) to create a configuration file that specifies the software and settings you want to use.

To do this, create a new file called "elasticbeanstalk.yaml" in the root directory of your Drupal site. In this file, specify the following:

option_settings:
aws:elasticbeanstalk:container:php:phpini:
document_root: /var/app/current
memory_limit: 512M
max_execution_time: 600

This configuration file sets the document root for your Drupal site and increases the memory limit and max execution time for PHP.

Now that your Elastic Beanstalk environment is configured, you can deploy your Drupal site to it. To do this, use the AWS CLI to create a ZIP file of your Drupal site files and upload it to your Elastic Beanstalk environment. You can also use the AWS Elastic Beanstalk console to upload and deploy your Drupal site.

To run Drupal, you will also need to set up a database. You can use Amazon RDS to create a MySQL or PostgreSQL database that your Drupal site can use. To do this, go to the Amazon RDS console and create a new database instance. Make sure to choose the appropriate database engine and version for your Drupal site.

Once your database is set up, you will need to configure your Drupal site to use it. To do this, edit your Drupal site's "settings.php" file and add the appropriate database connection information.

After you have deployed your Drupal site to Elastic Beanstalk, you should test it to make sure it is working properly. You can use tools like Apache JMeter to simulate traffic to your site and monitor its performance. You can also use AWS CloudWatch to monitor your Elastic Beanstalk environment and set up alarms to alert you if any issues arise.