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I have an Amazon EC2 instance which I have been using for quite some time for deployment of a .net application. The existing instance has a large database set up already on it which is used with the application. I am trying to find a way to use elastic beanstalk to deploy changes to the site (the DB will not have to be touched at all, just updates to the site that reads/writes to it). I am having trouble finding any instructions on how to do this or if it is even possible. The application is already currently deployed as well on my EC2 instance. Sorry for being so vague, first time using elastic beanstalk. Thanks!

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This is not possible: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a fairly unique Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering and involves various AWS products like Amazon EC2, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing etc., which all need to be orchestrated together to achieve the desired result, see Architectural Overview for details.

If you want to use elastic beanstalk to deploy changes to the site going forward, I'd recommend to migrate the application tier of your solution to an Elastic Beanstalk environment, while retaining the database tier on the current instance.

  • As a welcome side effect, this will also allow you to scale both tiers up and down independently, which is usually desired anyway at some point; for example, you could use several smaller EC2 instances for the application rather than the supposedly large one implied with your current single instance to gain fault tolerance and/or cost savings via Auto Scaling etc.
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Thanks, after a bit of searching I didn't think this was possible as well. Looking into if it is cheaper to have an RDS instance and then a beanstalk instance vs just the EC2 machine which was running both. Thanks again. –  njj56 May 1 '13 at 18:21
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