When we hear “Deployment” when talking about a new project and the need to get it up and running, we start thinking about all the possible headaches it might bring. Surely, there are no deployment processes without obstacles, but there are ways to reduce them. One possibility of reducing them is by automating, partially or totally, the deployment process and, it is in this context, that Elastic Beanstalk and Gitlab come into play.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform, delivered as a single application.

Both, together, gives us the possibility to host and maintain our application in a private cloud in an automated manner. To show one possible way of doing it, this article will demonstrate how to create and run a Node + Express application in an Elastic Beanstalk environment. To make the whole process easier to understand and reproduce, it will be divided into two steps: first one showing how to create an Elastic Beanstalk environment and the second one showing how to update the environment directly from Gitlab with its CI tool.

#nodejs #aws #gitlab #node #web-development