
Elastic Beanstalk now runs on EKS
Hey ๐๐ฝ
Elastic Beanstalk is fifteen years old, and most of us wrote it off a long time ago.
On September 17, AWS gave it an EKS cluster, buildpacks and OpenTelemetry. It's called Cluster Mode.
I spent a few days with it, and it's the first AWS convenience layer I'd actually build on. With caveats.
In this issue: what Cluster Mode is, what broke, and three AWS launches from the last two weeks worth knowing about.
๐ This Week's Deep DiveCluster Mode is a second way to run an app on Elastic Beanstalk. Instead of one EC2 environment per application, your app runs as a pod on a shared EKS cluster that Beanstalk creates and owns. Hand it source code and buildpacks build the image in CodeBuild. No Dockerfile. I have a rule for AWS services: build on the primitives, not on the convenience layers around them. Beanstalk has always been a convenience layer. I expected to write this one off too. So I deployed the same small Node.js app twice. Once on Cluster Mode, once on a classic Standard Mode environment on a $2/month spot instance. Then I pushed a broken version to both: same app, listening on the wrong port.
Standard Mode reported Cluster Mode did something else entirely. That's the part that went right. The rest: option namespaces nobody had documented, an IAM role whose trust policy everyone guesses wrong, no Spot, and a control plane that bills $73 a month before the first request. And a few hours after one failed run, AWS Support opened a case on my account that I never asked for. |
๐ฐ This Week in AWS๐EventBridge rebuilt its custom event buses
๐CloudWatch Omni is generally available
โกKinesis picks your partition keys now
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Cluster Mode isn't cheap for one app, and the tooling is day-one tooling. But if you run twenty small services on twenty Beanstalk environments, it's worth an afternoon.
Tried it already? Hit reply and tell me what broke for you.
See you next week! ๐
Tobi & Sandro