Deploying Java Apps on AWS Elastic Beanstalk and RDS

Elastic Beanstalk (EB) simplifies provisioning and deployment while keeping control over the underlying AWS resources.

Steps

1. Create a Dockerized Spring Boot app and push the image to ECR
2. Provision an EB environment (load-balanced, rolling updates)
3. Attach an RDS instance in the same VPC subnets
4. Configure health checks to hit /actuator/health/readiness
5. Enable blue/green for safe cutovers

Example Dockerrun.aws.json (v2)

{
  "AWSEBDockerrunVersion": 2,
  "containerDefinitions": [
    {
      "name": "api",
      "image": "public.ecr.aws/your-repo/your-image:latest",
      "essential": true,
      "portMappings": [{ "containerPort": 8080, "hostPort": 8080 }],
      "environment": [
        { "name": "SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE", "value": "prod" }
      ],
      "memory": 512,
      "cpu": 256
    }
  ]
}

EB is a great on-ramp for teams standardizing on Docker without managing full Kubernetes.

Step-by-Step: Elastic Beanstalk Deployment

1. Create Environment

• Use the EB CLI for convenience

pip install awsebcli --upgrade
eb init --platform docker --region ap-southeast-1 orders-eb

2. Configure Health Checks

• In the EB console, set the health check URL to /actuator/health/readiness

3. Database with RDS

• Create an RDS instance in the same VPC/subnets as EB
• Add a security group rule to allow EB instances to connect to RDS
• Configure SPRING_DATASOURCE_URL, SPRING_DATASOURCE_USERNAME, SPRING_DATASOURCE_PASSWORD in EB env vars

4. Blue/Green Deployments

• Create a second EB environment (green)
• Swap CNAMEs after validating smoke tests

5. Logs and Metrics

• Enable instance log streaming to CloudWatch
• Add /actuator/prometheus and scrape with your monitoring stack if applicable

6. Rolling Updates and Rollbacks

• Configure rolling with additional batch
• Keep last successful version to rollback quickly

Example GitHub Actions Workflow

name: Deploy to EB
on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-java@v4
        with:
          distribution: 'temurin'
          java-version: '21'
      - run: ./gradlew clean build -x test
      - run: zip -j build.zip Dockerrun.aws.json
      - uses: einaregilsson/beanstalk-deploy@v22
        with:
          aws_access_key: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          aws_secret_key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
          application_name: orders-eb
          environment_name: orders-eb-prod
          region: ap-southeast-1
          version_label: ${{ github.sha }}
          deployment_package: build.zip