Elastic Beanstalk concepts
This section explains some key Elastic Beanstalk concepts.
Application
An Elastic Beanstalk application is a logical collection of Elastic Beanstalk components, including environments, versions, and environment configurations. In Elastic Beanstalk an application is conceptually similar to a folder. AWS Elastic Beanstalk enables you to manage all of the resources that run your application as environments.
Application version
In Elastic Beanstalk, an application version refers to a specific, labeled iteration of deployable code for a web application. An application version points to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) object that contains the deployable code, such as a Java WAR file. An application version is part of an application. Applications can have many versions and each application version is unique. In a running environment, you can deploy any application version you already uploaded to the application, or you can upload and immediately deploy a new application version. You might upload multiple application versions to test differences between one version of your web application and another.
Environment
An environment is a collection of AWS resources running an application version. Each environment runs only one application version at a time, however, you can run the same application version or different application versions in many environments simultaneously. When you create an environment, Elastic Beanstalk provisions the resources needed in your AWS account to run the application version you specified.
Environment tier
When you launch an Elastic Beanstalk environment, you first choose an environment tier. The environment tier designates the type of application that the environment runs, and determines what resources Elastic Beanstalk provisions to support it. An application that serves HTTP requests runs in a web server environment tier. A backend environment that pulls tasks from an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue runs in a worker environment tier.
Environment configuration
An environment configuration identifies a collection of parameters and settings that define how an environment and its associated resources behave. When you update an environment’s configuration settings, Elastic Beanstalk automatically applies the changes to existing resources or deletes and deploys new resources (depending on the type of change).
Saved configuration
A saved configuration is a template that you can use as a starting point for creating unique environment configurations. You can create and modify saved configurations, and apply them to environments, using the Elastic Beanstalk console, EB CLI, AWS CLI, or API. The API and the AWS CLI refer to saved configurations as configuration templates.
Platform
A platform is a combination of an operating system, programming language runtime, web server, application server, and Elastic Beanstalk components. You design and target your web application to a platform. Elastic Beanstalk provides a variety of platforms on which you can build your applications.
For details, see Elastic Beanstalk platforms.
