Let’s talk about Amazon Beanstalk.
Once upon a time, there was a boy living in Oregon who wanted to quit his boring office job and become a developer. He enrolled in school online and studied hard until the day finally came when it was time to do his final project to become a big boy developer.
Connor and his team were tasked with taking a pre-existing program, freshening it up, adding additional features, and hosting it in the cloud. Not knowing what to do, the team did research until one member discovered a magical bean that could help them get the program to the cloud! This magical bean was called AWS Beanstalk. The team traded in their cow (local server) and got one of those magical beans, planted it, watered it, and showed it love. With much determination, the bean sprouted and carried the team and their program straight into the cloud! The end!
This past week, I have focused primarily on getting our program hosted on AWS Beanstalk, and to put it bluntly, it was a struggle. If any of you reading this have never used AWS before, get ready to dive through tutorials, documentation, and ask for help. Amazon claims its service is easy and simple to use, but for a first-time user, it is anything but. My biggest suggestion is to download the AWS Toolkit for whichever IDE you are using, in order to successfully upload, build, and run your programs. I first attempted to do it manually by creating an environment on Beanstalk and uploading a zip file of my working program. Each attempt returned poor results. Following that, I tried the AWS Toolkit extension way of things and also ran into problems, namely permissions. AWS Beanstalk comes equipped with hundreds of permissions available for each user. Because of how it works to run the AWS Toolkit, I had to create a sort of sub-user of my account and grant it full admin privileges, as well as “power user” privileges. Only then could I get my program to run successfully. It took hours of fiddling with their tools and website to understand how to use it all, but just like Jack, I made my way into the clouds on the Beanstalk.
I thoroughly enjoyed learning some of the ins and outs of AWS Beanstalk, despite the struggles. It felt good to dive into a technology I had never previously used and learn how to make it work. It gave me a real confidence boost in my ability to problem-solve. I highly recommend anyone considering Beanstalk to just jump in and give it a try.
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