TOP 50 Interview Questions on AWS Cloud Computing Services -Elastic Beanstalk

1. What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk makes it even easier for developers to quickly deploy and manage applications within the AWS Cloud. Developers simply upload their Elastic Beanstalk, and applications automatically handle the deployment details of capacity provisioning, auto-scaling, load balancing, and application health monitoring.

2. Who should use AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Those who want to deploy and manage their applications within minutes within the AWS Cloud. You don’t need experience with cloud computing to get started. AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports Node.js, Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, PHP, Go, and Docker web applications.

3. Which languages and development stacks does AWS Elastic Beanstalk support?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports the subsequent languages and development stacks:

• Apache Tomcat for Java applications
• Apache HTTP Server for PHP applications
• Apache HTTP Server for Python applications
• Nginx or Apache HTTP Server for Node.js applications
• Passenger or Puma for Ruby applications
• Microsoft IIS 7.5, 8.0, and 8.5 for .NET applications
• Java SE
• Docker

4. Will AWS Elastic Beanstalk support other languages?

Yes. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is meant in order that it is often extended to support multiple development stacks and programming languages within the future. AWS is working with solution providers on the APIs and capabilities needed to create additional Elastic Beanstalk offerings.

5. What elements of my application can I control when using AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

With AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you can:

• Select the operating system that matches your application requirements (e.g., Amazon Linux or Windows Server 2016)
• Choose from several Amazon EC2 instances including On-Demand, Reserved instances, and Spot instances
• Choose from several available database and storage options
• Enable login access to Amazon EC2 instances for immediate and direct troubleshooting
• Quickly improve application reliability by running in additional than one Availability Zone
• Enhance application security by enabling HTTPS protocol on the load balancer
• Access built-in Amazon CloudWatch monitoring and getting notifications on application health and other important events
• Adjust application server settings (e.g., JVM settings) and pass environment variables
• Run other application components, such as a memory caching service, side-by-side in Amazon EC2
• Access log files without logging in to the application servers

6. What kinds of applications are supported by AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker, and is right for web applications. However, thanks to Elastic Beanstalk’s open architecture, non-web applications also can be deployed using Elastic Beanstalk. We expect to support additional application types and programming languages in the future. See Supported Platforms to learn more.

7. Which operating systems does AWS Elastic Beanstalk use?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk runs on the Amazon Linux AMI and therefore the Windows Server AMI. Both AMIs are supported and maintained by Amazon Web Services and are designed to supply a stable, secure, and high-performance execution environment for Amazon EC2 Cloud computing.

8. How do I sign up for AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

To sign up for AWS Elastic Beanstalk, choose the Sign Up Now button on the Elastic Beanstalk detail page. You must have an Amazon Web Services account to access this service; if you are not having already got one, you’ll be prompted to make one once you begin the Elastic Beanstalk process. After signing up, please refer to the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Getting Started Guide.

9. Why am I asked to verify my phone number when signing up for AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk registration requires you to possess a legitimate telephone number and email address on file with AWS just in case we ever got to contact you. Verifying your phone number takes only a few minutes and involves receiving an automated phone call during the registration process and entering a PIN number using the phone keypad.

10. How do I get started after I have signed up?

The best way to get started with AWS Elastic Beanstalk is to work through the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Getting Started Guide, part of our technical documentation. Within a few minutes, you will be able to deploy and use a sample application or upload your own application.

11. Does AWS Elastic Beanstalk store anything in Amazon S3?

Yes. It stores your optionally, application files, server log files in Amazon S3. If you’re using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, or AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, an Amazon S3 bucket are going to be created in your account for you and therefore the files you upload are going to be automatically copied from your local client to Amazon S3. Optionally, you’ll configure Elastic Beanstalk to repeat your server log files every hour to Amazon S3. 

12. What database solutions can I use with AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk doesn’t restrict you to any specific data persistence technology. You can choose to use Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) or Amazon DynamoDB, or use Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, or other relational databases running on Amazon EC2.

13. How do I set up a database for use with AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

It can automatically provision an Amazon RDS DB instance. The information about the DB instance is exposed to your application by environment variables. To learn more about how to configure RDS DB instances for your environment, see the Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

14. How do I grant an IAM user access to AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

You can grant IAM users access to services by using policies. To simplify the process of granting access to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you can use one of the policy templates in the IAM console to help you get started. Elastic Beanstalk offers two templates: 

• a read-only access template  
• a full-access template

The read-only template grants read access to Elastic Beanstalk resources. The full-access template Elastic Beanstalk operations has full access and also as permissions to manage dependent resources, Auto Scaling, like Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon S3. You can also use the AWS Policy Generator to create custom policies. 

15. Can I restrict access to specific AWS Elastic Beanstalk resources?

Yes. You can allow or deny permissions to specific AWS Elastic Beanstalk resources, such as applications, application versions, and environments.

16. Who has access to an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment launched by an IAM user?

The root account has full access to all AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments launched by any IAM user under that account. If you use the Elastic Beanstalk template to grant read-only access to an IAM user, that user will be able to view all applications, application versions, environments, and any associated resources in that account. If you use the Elastic Beanstalk template to grant full access to an IAM user, that user will be able to create, modify, and terminate any Elastic Beanstalk resources under that account.

17. Can an IAM user access the AWS Elastic Beanstalk console?

Yes. An IAM user can access the AWS Elastic Beanstalk console using their username and password.

18. Can an IAM user call the AWS Elastic Beanstalk API?

Yes. An IAM user can use their access key and secret key to perform operations using the Elastic Beanstalk API.

19. Can an IAM user use the AWS Elastic Beanstalk command line interface?

Yes. An IAM user can use their access key and secret key to perform operations using the AWS Elastic Beanstalk command line interface (CLI).

20. How does AWS Elastic Beanstalk distinguish between “major,” “minor,” and “patch” version releases?

Its platforms are versioned using this pattern: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH (e.g., 2.0.0). Each portion is incremented as follows:

• MAJOR version when there are incompatible changes.
• MINOR version when there’s additional functionality added during a backward-compatible manner.
• PATCH version when there are backward-compatible bug fixes.

21. How does Elastic Beanstalk apply managed platform updates?

The updates are applied using an immutable deployment mechanism that ensures that no changes are made to the existing environment until a parallel fleet of Amazon EC2 instances, with the updates installed, is ready to be swapped with the existing instances, which are then terminated. In addition, if the Elastic Beanstalk health system detects any issues during the update, traffic is redirected to the existing fleet of instances, ensuring minimal impact to end users of your application.

22. Where can I find details of changes between platform versions?

Details on changes between platform versions can be found on the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Release Notes page.

23. How much does AWS Elastic Beanstalk cost?

There is no additional charge for AWS Elastic Beanstalk–you pay just for the AWS resources you actually want to store and run your application.

24. Does AWS Support cover AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Yes. AWS Support covers issues associated with your use of AWS Elastic Beanstalk. 

25. AWS Elastic Beanstalk Benefits?

Now that we understand what Elastic Beanstalk is in AWS and how Elastic beanstalk works, let now understand what are the benefits of using Elastic Beanstalk. So, Elastic Beanstalk provides the user with several benefits and they are:

• Easy to start with
• Autoscaling options
• Developer productivity
• Customization
• Cost-effective
• Management and updates

26. What are the components of an Elastic Beanstalk?

The components of an Elastic Beanstalk environment are

Application – An Elastic Beanstalk application may be a logical collection of Elastic Beanstalk components, including environments, versions, and environment configurations

Application Version – In Elastic Beanstalk, an application version refers to a selected , labeled iteration of deployable code for an internet application.

Environment – An environment is a version that is deployed on AWS resources. Each environment runs only one application version at a time, however you’ll run an equivalent version or different versions in many environments at an equivalent time. When you create an environment, Elastic Beanstalk provisions the resources needed to run the appliance version you specified

Environment configuration – An environment configuration identifies a set of parameters and settings that outline how an environment and its associated resources behave

Configuration template – A configuration template may be a start line for creating unique environment configurations

27. How do I delete personal information from my Elastic Beanstalk application?

Elastic Beanstalk applications might store personal information. When you terminate an environment, Elastic Beanstalk terminates the resources that it created. Also terminated resources you added using configuration files. However, if you created AWS resources outside of your Elastic Beanstalk environment and associated them with your application, you might need to manually ensure that personal information that your application might have stored isn’t unnecessarily retained. Throughout this developer guide, wherever we discuss the creation of additional resources, we also mention when you should consider deleting them.

28. How is AWS Elastic Beanstalk different from existing application containers or platform-as-a-service solutions?

Platform-as-a-service solutions or Most existing application containers, while significantly diminish developers’ flexibility and control, reducing the quantity of programming required. Developers are forced to live with all the decisions predetermined by the vendor–with little to no opportunity to take back control over various parts of their application’s infrastructure. With AWS Elastic Beanstalk, developers retain full control over the application of AWS resources powering. If developers need to manage some of the weather of their infrastructure, they will do so seamlessly by using Elastic Beanstalk’s management capabilities.

29. What are the Cloud resources powering my AWS Elastic Beanstalk application?

It uses proven AWS services and features, such as Amazon RDS, Amazon EC2, Auto Scaling, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon SNS, to create an environment that runs your application. The Amazon Linux AMI or the Windows Server 2012 R2 AMI are used by the current version of AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

30. How do I make my application private?

By default, your application is out there publicly at myapp.elasticbeanstalk.com for anyone to access. You can use Amazon VPC to provision a private, isolated section of your application in a virtual network that you define. This virtual network can be made private through specific security group rules, network ACLs, and custom route tables. You can also easily control what other incoming traffic, such as SSH, is delivered or not to your application servers by changing the EC2 security group settings.

31. Is it possible to use Identity & Access Management (IAM) with AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Yes. IAM users with the acceptable permissions can now interact with AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

32. Why should I use IAM with AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

IAM allows you to manage users and groups in a centralized manner. You can control which IAM users have access to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and limit permissions to read-only access to Elastic Beanstalk for operators who should not be able to perform actions against Elastic Beanstalk resources. All user activity within your account is going to be aggregated under one AWS bill.

33. Can an IAM user call the AWS Elastic Beanstalk API?

Yes. An IAM user can use their access key and secret key to perform operations using the Elastic Beanstalk API.

34. When and how can I perform major version updates?

You can perform major version updates at any time using the AWS Elastic Beanstalk management console, API, or CLI. You have the following options to perform a major version update:

Apply the update in-place on an existing environment. See Updating Your Elastic Beanstalk Environment’s Platform Version.

Create a clone of an existing environment with the new platform version. See Clone an Environment to learn more.

35. What other support options are available?

You can tap into the breadth of existing AWS community knowledge to help you with your development through the AWS Elastic Beanstalk discussion forum.

36. What are the elements of the application when using Elastic Beanstalk on AWS?

While using the AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you can have control over a lot of elements of your application. To get a detailed description of all of them, you can simply check out the below-given points:

• You can manually select the desired operating system according to your application requirements. (For eg. Windows Server 2012 R2 or Amazon Linux)
• You can choose your desired storage option and database.
• You can enable direct login access to the Amazon EC2 instances for immediate troubleshooting.
• You can run your application in more than one available zone, which will improve its reliability.
• You can enable HTTPS protocol on the load balancer to enhance the application security.
• You can monitor and get notified about the application health and additional important events with the help of Amazon CloudWatch.
• You can pass the environment variables by adjusting the application server settings.
• You can run additional required application components like a memory caching service in Amazon EC2.
• You can easily access the log files without even signing in to the application servers.

37. What can developers now do with AWS Elastic Beanstalk that they could not before?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk automates the small print of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto scaling, and application deployment, creating an environment that runs a version of your application. You can simply upload your deployable code (e.g., WAR file), and AWS Elastic Beanstalk does the remainder . The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio and therefore the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse allow you to deploy your application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and manage it without leaving your IDE. Once your application is running, Elastic Beanstalk automates management tasks–such as monitoring, application version deployment, a basic health check–and facilitates log file access. By using Elastic Beanstalk, developers can specialise in developing their application and are free of deployment-oriented tasks, like provisioning servers, fixing load balancing, or managing scaling.

38. Is there a sample application that I can use to check out AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Yes. AWS Elastic Beanstalk includes a sample application that you simply can use to check drive the offering and explore its functionality.

39. Does this mean I need to modify the application code when moving from test to production?

Not with AWS Elastic Beanstalk. With Elastic Beanstalk, you can specify the connection information in the environment configuration. By extracting the connection string from the application code, you can easily configure different Elastic Beanstalk environments to use different databases.

40. How can I keep the underlying platform of the environment running my application automatically up-to-date?

You can opt-in to having your AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments automatically updated to the newest version of the underlying platform running your application during a specified maintenance window. Elastic Beanstalk regularly releases new versions of supported platforms (Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python, .NET, Go, and Docker) with operating system, web and application server, and language and framework updates.

41. How can I get started with managed platform updates?

Your platform updates are automatically managed by Elastic Beanstalk, you want to enable managed platform updates within the Configuration tab of the Elastic Beanstalk console or use the EB CLI or API. After you have enabled the feature, you can configure which types of updates to allow and when updates can occur.

42. What kinds of platform version updates will managed platform updates apply?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk can automatically perform platform updates for brand spanking new patch and minor platform versions. Elastic Beanstalk will not automatically perform major platform version updates (e.g., Java 7 Tomcat 7 to Java 8 Tomcat 8) because they include backwards incompatible changes and require additional testing. In these cases, you must manually initiate the update.

43. Will my application be available during the maintenance windows?

Since managed platform updates use an immutable deployment mechanism to perform the updates, your application will be available during the maintenance window and consumers of your application will not be impacted by the update.

44. What is a maintenance window?

A maintenance window is a weekly two-hour-long time slot during which AWS Elastic Beanstalk will initiate platform updates if managed platform updates is enabled and a new version of the platform is available. For example, if you select a maintenance window that begins every Sunday at 2 AM, AWS Elastic Beanstalk will initiate the platform update sometime between 2-4 AM every Sunday. It is important to note that, depending on the configuration of your applications, updates could complete outside of the maintenance window.

45. How will I be notified of the availability of new platform versions?

You will be notified about the availability of new platform versions through the AWS Management Console, forum announcements, and release notes.

46. Where can I find details of changes between platform versions?

Details on changes between platform versions can be found on the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Release Notes page.

47. How much do the AWS resources powering my application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk cost?

You pay just for what you employ , and there’s no minimum fee for the utilization of any AWS resources. For Amazon EC2 pricing information, please visit the pricing section on the EC2 detail page. For Amazon S3 pricing information, please visit the pricing section on the S3 detail page. You can use the AWS simple calculator to estimate your bill for various application sizes.

48. How do I check how many AWS resources have been used by my application and access my bill?

You can view your charges for the current billing period at any time on the Amazon Web Services web site by logging into your Amazon Web Services account and choosing Account Activity under Your Web Services Account.

49. Explain workflow of Elastic Beanstalk?

To use Elastic Beanstalk, you create an application, upload an application version in the form of an application source bundle (for example, a Java .war file) to Elastic Beanstalk, and then provide some information about the application. It automatically launches an environment and creates and configures the AWS resources. After your environment is launched, you’ll then manage your environment and deploy new application versions. The below diagram illustrates the workflow of Elastic Beanstalk.

After you create and deploy your application, information about the application—including metrics, events, and environment status—is available through the Elastic Beanstalk console, APIs, or Command Line Interfaces, including the unified AWS CLI.

50. Elastic Beanstalk does?

In addition, Elastic Beanstalk does the following:

• Publishes its platform support policy and retirement schedule for the coming 12 months.
• Releases patch, minor, and major updates of operating system (OS), runtime, application server, and web server components typically within 30 days of their availability. Elastic Beanstalk is liable for creating updates to Elastic Beanstalk components that are present on its supported platform versions.