AWS beanstalk is an amazon web service that does most of the configuration for you and creates an infrastructure suitable for a horizontally scalable application. Instead of Beanstalk the other approach would be to configure load balancers and auto scalling groups, which requires a bit of AWS expertise and time.

On this tutorial we are going to upload a spring boot jar application using amazon elastic beanstalk and a cloud formation bundle.

Less is more therefore we are going to use pretty much the same spring boot application taken from the official Spring guide as a template.

The only change would be to alter the rootProject.name to beanstalk-deployment and some changes on the package structure. Downloading the project from github is sufficient.

Then we can build and run the project

gradlew build
java -jar build/libs/beanstalk-deployment-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar 

Next step is to upload the application to s3.

aws s3 cp build/libs/beanstalk-deployment-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar s3://{you bucket name}/beanstalk-deployment-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar

You need to install the elastic beanstalk client since it helps a lot with most beanstalk operations.

Since we will use Java 8 I would get a list with elastic beanstalk environments in order to retrieve the correct SolutionStackName.

aws elasticbeanstalk list-available-solution-stacks |grep Java 

Based on the results I will use the “64bit Amazon Linux 2016.09 v2.3.0 running Java 8” stackname.

Now we are ready to proceed to our cloudformation script.

We will specify a parameter and this will be the bucket containing the application code

  "Parameters" : {
    "SourceCodeBucket" : {
      "Type" : "String"
    }
  }

Then we will specify the name of the application

    "SpringBootApplication": {
      "Type": "AWS::ElasticBeanstalk::Application",
      "Properties": {
        "Description":"Spring boot and elastic beanstalk"
      }
    }

Next step will be to specify the application version

    "SpringBootApplicationVersion": {
      "Type": "AWS::ElasticBeanstalk::ApplicationVersion",
      "Properties": {
        "ApplicationName":{"Ref":"SpringBootApplication"},
        "SourceBundle": {
                  "S3Bucket": {"Ref":"SourceCodeBucket"},
                  "S3Key": "beanstalk-deployment-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar"
        }
      }
    }

And then we specify our configuration template.

    "SpringBootBeanStalkConfigurationTemplate": {
      "Type": "AWS::ElasticBeanstalk::ConfigurationTemplate",
      "Properties": {
        "ApplicationName": {"Ref":"SpringBootApplication"},
        "Description":"A display of speed boot application",
        "OptionSettings": [
          {
            "Namespace": "aws:autoscaling:asg",
            "OptionName": "MinSize",
            "Value": "2"
          },
          {
            "Namespace": "aws:autoscaling:asg",
            "OptionName": "MaxSize",
            "Value": "2"
          },
          {
            "Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:environment",
            "OptionName": "EnvironmentType",
            "Value": "LoadBalanced"
          }
        ],
        "SolutionStackName": "64bit Amazon Linux 2016.09 v2.3.0 running Java 8"
      }
    }

The last step would be to glue the above properties by defining an environment

    "SpringBootBeanstalkEnvironment": {
      "Type": "AWS::ElasticBeanstalk::Environment",
      "Properties": {
        "ApplicationName": {"Ref":"SpringBootApplication"},
        "EnvironmentName":"JavaBeanstalkEnvironment",
        "TemplateName": {"Ref":"SpringBootBeanStalkConfigurationTemplate"},
        "VersionLabel": {"Ref": "SpringBootApplicationVersion"}
      }
    }

Now you are ready to upload your cloudformation template and deploy your beanstalk application

aws s3 cp beanstalkspring.template s3://{bucket with templates}/beanstalkspring.template
aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name SpringBeanStalk --parameters ParameterKey=SourceCodeBucket,ParameterValue={bucket with code} --template-url https://s3.amazonaws.com/{bucket with templates}/beanstalkspring.template

You can download the full sourcecode and the cloudformation template from Github.