Auto-Scaling with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Docker and PHP

Presented by Kevin Crawley

twitter: @notsureifkevin

linkedin: linkedin.com/in/kcmastrpc

email: kevin@nashville.hotchicken.org

There will be a tutorial during this talk.

Clone this repository: https://github.com/kcrawley/nashphp-awseb.git
Login to your AWS account (or sign up for one):
https://aws.amazon.com/

About Me

Middle Tennessee Native (20+ years).
Senior DevOps Engineer @ Built Technologies.
Started programming when I was 10.
Failed attempt at a career in the music industry.

What are we doing here?

This is a tutorial and guided setup of a Laravel application which is running on NGINX/PHP-FPM using multi-container docker managed on AWS with Elastic Beanstalk.

If you'd like to follow along visit https://github.com/kcrawley/nashphp-awseb

Why should you care about auto scaling?

(and perhaps why you shouldn't)

Benefits

Containerization allows application environments across multiple platforms
Beanstalk is relatively easy to configure and use
Advanced metrics and reporting with Cloudwatch

Drawbacks

Bootstrap for Beanstalk is an additional abstraction of Docker Compose
Fairly difficult to troubleshoot
Beanstalk can be difficult to configure and use
So many options!!!!!

Docker + Elastic Beanstalk!?

Let's get started

Setup - Application Info

Setup - Create New Environment

Setup - Environment Type

Setup - App Version

Setup - Environment Info

Setup - Resources

Setup - Config Details

Setup - Tags

Setup - Permissions

So many options!

Instance Configuration

Deployment Configuration

Load Balancer Configuration

Managed Updates

Just you and me, baby.

Start small, you probably don't need more than two servers.
As your traffic increases you can identify patterns which indicate how you should configure auto-scale.
- Network Traffic
- Memory Pressure
- CPU Load
AWS replace servers which fail health checks in order to maintain the minimum number of healthy servers

Scalability !== Resiliency

More complexity ultimately means more failure points
Elastic Beanstalk is a combination of many different AWS components and therefore can fail in spectacular ways (or tell you it's failing when it's not)
- Route 53
- Elastic Container Service
- EC2
- Cloud Watch
- Elastic Load Balancer
- Autoscaling Groups
If you depend on multi 9 uptime, this tutorial is likely of no interest to you.

{
  "name": "php",
  "image": "kcmastrpc/nashphp-php",
  "environment": [
    {
      "name": "APP_ENV",
      "value": "production"
    },
    {
      "name": "APP_DEBUG",
      "value": "false"
    },
    {
      "name": "APP_URL",
      "value": "http://nashphp.hotchicken.org"
    }
  ],
  "mountPoints": [
    {
      "sourceVolume": "app",
      "containerPath": "/var/www/app"
    },
    {
      "sourceVolume": "php-fpm-conf",
      "containerPath": "/usr/local/etc/php-fpm.d"
    }
  ]

nashphp-awseb/dockerrun.aws.json

Tells Elastic Beanstalk how to configure and startup Docker to run our application
We include configuration files which properly setup nginx/php-fpm to serve our Laravel Application
We can define custom Environment parameters which are passed to the PHP-FPM container (this is useful when build scripts can populate these values)

commands:
  create_post_dir:
    command: "mkdir /opt/elasticbeanstalk/hooks/appdeploy/post"
    ignoreErrors: true
files:
  "/opt/elasticbeanstalk/hooks/appdeploy/post/composer_install.sh":
    mode: "000755"
    owner: root
    group: root
    content: |
      #!/usr/bin/env bash
      docker run --rm -v /var/app/current/nashphp:/app composer/composer install --no-dev
      chmod -R 777 /var/app/current/nashphp
      docker run -v /var/app/current/nashphp:/app php:7-cli /app/artisan key:generate

nashphp-awseb/deploy/.ebextensions/laravelcomposer.config

ebextensions allow the developer to create custom hooks during the deploy process which can perform many common tasks
- here we are installing Laravel dependencies by running the official composer docker image
- we also generate a unique encryption key for the app
- this is also a great place to pull in a .env file from S3 or Vault, as keeping that file within a shared repository is bad.