Deploy a Symfony application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Docker

Getting started with AWS Elastic Beanstalk can be challenging. We will review reasons to use it, and how to easily set up a web application, developed with the Symfony framework, on a high-availability, scalable, hosting using Docker multicontainer platform.

Transcript

1. Deploy a Symfony
   application on AWS
   Beanstalk with Docker
   SymfonyCon Lisbon 2018
   

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2. Hello, I'm Romaric.
   I work at netinfluence @ Lausanne,
   Switzerland.
   

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3. What's our goal?
   We want a setup one-man* can manage
   We want high availability
   As a bonus, we would like to have auto-scalability
   *It also means documented, to account for "bus factor".
   

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4. Why Docker?
   Avoid snowflake
   servers
   Documentation as
   code
   More robust: easier
   to rebuild,
   upgrade, rollback
   Easier to deploy a
   new server
   

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5. Why AWS
   Elastic
   Beanstalk?
   We were already
   using some AWS
   services.
   Huge ecosystem
   Competitive prices
   3 different solutions:
   ECS (advanced)
   Elastic Beanstalk
   Fargate (serverless)
   

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6. How does it
   costs?
   It is free
   

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7. How does it
   costs?
   It is free
   You pay for used
   ressources, typically
   EC2 instances and ELB
   load balancer
   ($20/month).
   Plus other services you may
   use outside of EB.
   

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8. Getting started
   

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9. Step 1: Prepare your application
   

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10. Move all state (data) out of web servers
    Use an external file storage for uploaded files
    S3...
    Split the database from web servers
    AWS RDS for MySQL/PostgreSQL, set up your own DB EC2
    instance...
    Store sessions in a shared storage
    DB (easy!), memcached or Redis (AWS ElastiCache)...
    Optional: send logs to an external service
    Sentry...
    

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11. Pro tip: use AWS Route53 namesevers
    You don't have to register your domain name with AWS, but you should
    use Route53 as nameserver(s) (set up a hosted zone, a few $/month),
    so you can use an alias A record instead of copying the load balancer
    IP.
    It will also make getting SSL certificates easier, with AWS ACM (free).
    

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12. Use
    environment
    variables for
    configuration
    Supported in Symfony
    2 with Incenteev
    Parameter handler,
    Symfony3 (getenv),
    Symfony4
    Also supported in
    php.ini
    For other scenarii, use
    envsubst
    

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13. Step 2: Define architecture
    

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14. Elastic Beanstalk concepts
    Platform: Docker (not PHP)
    2 flavors: "single container" platform or "multicontainer" platform.
    Application: our project (with history of code versions...), we will have
    only one.
    Environment: an "instance" of our application, with some configuration
    and resources (EC2 instances...). It could be "staging" and
    "production".
    

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15. Container(s) architecture
    From AWS EB multi-container documentation
    

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16. Listing containers
    We need:
    1..n container for nginx
    1..n for PHP-FPM
    1 running Cron jobs
    1 for ephemeral tasks (like running DB migrations...)
    Some can auto-scale, some should not (ie., Cron).
    Solution: use 2 Beanstalk environments, myapp-web and myapp-
    worker
    

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17. Step 3: make Docker images
    

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18. Step 4: create the manifest file
    

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19. Manifest file: Dockerrun.aws.json
    Everything is declared in a Dockerrun.aws.json file, in our project
    directory.
    We have 2 different files, one for myapp-web and one for myapp-
    worker.
    Full code on Gist here
    {
    "volumes": [
    {
    "name": "sf-app",
    "host": {
    "sourcePath": "/var/app/current"
    }
    }
    ],
    "AWSEBDockerrunVersion": 2,
    "containerDefinitions": [
    {
    "name": "php-web",
    

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20. Step 5: deploying
    

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21. Step 5.1: create the app on Elastic
    Beanstalk
    

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22. Select multi-container, and sample
    application
    

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23. Select "high availability", and then you can
    configure rolling updates
    

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24. Step 5.2: deploy your code
    

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25. Deploying...
    Install EB CLI.
    From our application folder, with the application installed* and
    everything committed to Git**, we can now run eb deploy [--
    init]:
    *So you should composer install and generate assets before
    **If you are using Git and some files are not committed, by default EB will
    deploy committed changes only.
    

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26. Done!
    romaric@netinfluence.ch
    

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