AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Service for running web apps with less detailed server management.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service that creates and manages an execution environment for your application simply by uploading your application code.

• Simple deployment of web apps
• Running EC2-based applications
• Publishing learning apps

• A PaaS-oriented service
• Manages the application execution environment for you
• Resources such as EC2 are used behind the scenes

• Simplifies deployment while keeping infrastructure control
• Not serverless, so be mindful of fixed costs
• For small static sites, S3 + CloudFront is a better fit

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a deployment service that leans toward PaaS (Platform as a Service): simply by uploading the application source code (zip / war / Docker image, etc.), it automatically builds and operates the underlying runtime environment of EC2, Auto Scaling group, ELB, security groups, health checks, and so on. It supports a wide range of languages and runtimes including Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, PHP, and Docker, and allows you to choose between two environment types: web application (HTTP request processing) and worker (SQS queue processing). A characteristic of Elastic Beanstalk is that "it does not completely hide infrastructure control; the user can override EC2 or Auto Scaling settings as needed". Unlike fully serverless services like Lambda or App Runner, EC2 instances are kept running underneath, so fixed costs for EC2 / EBS / ELB are incurred even when there is no traffic. For personal-development MVPs and validation use cases, this fixed cost can become a cost blind spot, and for static-content sites S3 + CloudFront is often more cost-efficient, while for intermittent workloads Lambda + API Gateway tends to be advantageous. Typical use cases in practice are mid-sized web applications that want a Heroku-like simple deployment experience on AWS, migration of existing applications that want to run on EC2 but reduce the construction and operation cost of Auto Scaling and ELB, and internal applications with the requirement of "reducing infrastructure construction effort while retaining EC2-level customizability". CLF-C02 asks questions such as "a service that creates and manages the runtime environment simply by uploading the application code" and "a PaaS-oriented service", while SAA-C03 and beyond ask in depth about Blue/Green deployment of environment settings, fine-grained override with `.ebextensions`, custom AMIs, VPC placement, and operational integration with CloudWatch.

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk (AWS Official)
• What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk (AWS Official Documentation)
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk Basic Concepts (AWS Official Documentation)

Last updated: 2026-06-07