AWS Elastic Beanstalk Features

AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports web applications written in many popular languages and frameworks. It requires no or minimal code changes to go from development machine to the cloud. Development options for deploying your web applications include Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Python, Go, and Docker. It now offers two deployment modes: Standard Mode and Cluster Mode.

Standard Mode runs applications directly on Amazon EC2. Upload source code in a ZIP archive, and specify your language runtime or include a Dockerfile. Standard Mode is highly cost-effective for smaller or fewer applications, supports all major language runtimes without containerization, and is the only mode that supports Windows and .NET Framework workloads. Additional deployment strategies including traffic shifting are available.

Cluster Mode runs applications on service-operated compute with modern infrastructure under the hood. Supply source code or a container image. Elastic Beanstalk automatically builds source into container images, creates the environment, deploys the application, applies rolling updates, and scales application replicas. Server provisioning, patching, scaling, and compute-platform management are fully handled by Elastic Beanstalk. Cluster Mode enables faster deployments, faster autoscaling, improved resource utilization across multiple environments, and managed OpenTelemetry integration.

Scale compute instances on Standard Mode through Auto Scaling groups that respond to CPU utilization, network I/O, and custom CloudWatch alarms. Scale at the application layer on Cluster Mode through event-driven autoscaling that responds to CPU and memory utilization, cron-based schedules, and Metrics API-based scalers. Select from any EC2 instance type including Spot Instances and AWS Graviton arm64-based processors for improved price-performance. Achieve faster, more precise scaling that responds to real application demand rather than infrastructure proxies.

Monitor application health continuously during every deployment. EB evaluates both infrastructure health (compute instance status and availability) and application health (health-check responses), then automatically rolls back to the last known-good version if a deployment fails its health checks. Revert automatically to the previous known-good version if any signal indicates degradation, including application crash loops, memory limit breaches, or deployments exceeding their expected completion window. Specify your app's health check path, run by default on every deployment, and reduce recovery time from minutes to seconds without waiting for operator intervention.

Report environment health through color-coded aggregate status (Green, Yellow, Red, Grey) integrating signals from the load balancer and compute instances. Surface detailed metrics including request counts, latency percentiles (p50, p75, p95, p99), and HTTP status code distributions. Support distributed tracing through AWS X-Ray for instrumented applications. With Cluster Mode, export telemetry to CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Prometheus, or any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend.

Deploy your application into your own Amazon VPC with full control over subnet selection, security group rules, and route table associations. Attach an ACM certificate to the Elastic Load Balancer on Standard Mode or HTTPS support. Enforce HTTPS by default on Cluster Mode where the service provisions an ACM certificate, and renews the certificate automatically before expiration. Configure IAM roles through the console or CLI during environment creation. Distribute application replicas across at least two availability zones by default for high availability. Elastic Beanstalk runs on AWS infrastructure that is HIPAA eligible, PCI DSS compliant, SOC 2 attested, and FedRAMP authorized. Organizations can leverage these certifications as part of their own compliance posture. Workload-level compliance remains a shared responsibility. Download third-party audit reports through AWS Artifact. Keep all resources in your AWS account with no shared infrastructure between customers.

Apply the latest platform patches, runtime updates, and security fixes automatically without manual intervention on Standard Mode. Control the maintenance window and opt in to automatic minor or major version upgrades on your schedule. Standard deploys updates using an immutable mechanism that launches a parallel set of instances with the new platform version, validates health, and swaps traffic only after confirmation, ensuring zero-downtime patching. On Cluster Mode, EKS Auto Mode manages node-level patching and replacement automatically.