Operations Runbooks for AWS Elastic Beanstalk¶

Prerequisites¶

• Access to an AWS account with permissions for Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, IAM, CloudWatch, and SNS.
• Familiarity with your application name, environment names, platform branch, and deployment workflow.
• AWS CLI configured with a named profile, for example --profile eb-ops.
• Elastic Beanstalk CLI installed for workflows that use eb commands.
• Existing web server or worker environments to operate.

When to Use¶

• Use this section when operating active environments across scaling, health, security, updates, and cost management.
• Use these runbooks for repeatable maintenance windows, incident response, and controlled change management.
• Use these pages to keep operational actions aligned with AWS Elastic Beanstalk developer guide behavior.

Procedure¶

The table below maps common operational goals to the detailed runbook pages in this section.

flowchart TD
    A[Plan Change] --> B[Choose Runbook]
    B --> C[Prepare Prerequisites]
    C --> D[Execute Procedure]
    D --> E[Verify Health and Events]
    E --> F{Outcome Healthy?}
    F -- Yes --> G[Record Change]
    F -- No --> H[Run Rollback or Troubleshooting]
    H --> E

Recommended execution sequence for changes that can affect production traffic:

1. Confirm baseline environment health in the Elastic Beanstalk console.
2. Save current environment configuration for recovery and consistency.
3. Apply changes in a non-production clone where possible.
4. Validate application behavior and Elastic Beanstalk health status.
5. Promote via CNAME swap or Route 53 cutover when using blue/green methods.
6. Monitor environment events until the update is fully stable.

Use these standard command patterns before and after any change:

aws elasticbeanstalk describe-environments \
    --application-name "my-app" \
    --environment-names "my-app-prod" \
    --profile "eb-ops" \
    --region "us-east-1"

aws elasticbeanstalk describe-events \
    --environment-name "my-app-prod" \
    --max-records 50 \
    --profile "eb-ops" \
    --region "us-east-1"

Operational notes:

• Perform environment updates through Elastic Beanstalk, not directly through underlying service consoles, to avoid configuration drift.
• Prefer immutable or blue/green style changes for higher availability and lower operational risk.
• Keep environment variables, tags, and option settings versioned and reviewed.
• Use placeholders in examples to prevent exposing account-specific information.
• Use the dedicated blue/green and immutable runbooks when deployment policy choice is part of the change plan.

Verification¶

• Confirm environment health is Green or the expected enhanced health status after each operation.
• Confirm describe-events output shows successful completion and no unresolved warnings.
• Confirm load balancer target health and application response paths are stable.
• Confirm change metadata is recorded in your team runbook or change ticket.

Rollback / Troubleshooting¶

• Reapply a known-good saved configuration when a change introduces instability.
• Rebuild a broken environment when unmanaged changes make it invalid.
• Use clone and CNAME swap to return traffic to a previous stable environment.
• Roll back immutable deployments by redeploying a known-good version or using blue/green when environment state itself is suspect.
• Investigate Elastic Beanstalk events and health causes before repeating failed actions.

See Also¶

• Scaling
• Environment Management
• Blue/Green Deployment
• Immutable Deployment
• Health Monitoring
• Updates and Patching
• Networking
• Security
• Cost Optimization

Sources¶

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features.managing.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features.CNAMESwap.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/environmentmgmt-updates-immutable.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features.managing.as.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/health-enhanced.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/environment-platform-update-managed.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features.managing.elb.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/security.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features.managing.ec2.html