Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a whole bunch of services that enables us to deploy and host services, store process data, scales these services etc. It involves dealing with load balances, security, operating systems etc. In short it’s not exactly quick and easy. So Amazon released Elastic Beanstalk to help make deployment, versioning and scaling and general management of these services easier.

From a testing point of view AWS can be a good place to host your Jenkins instance, create a test environment and even run your tests. And Elastic Beanstalk is an easy way to set this up. Below I’ll walk through how to deploy a basic Docker application on Elastic Beanstalk.

Step 1

Sign up for a free AWS account at http://aws.amazon.com/. The free account gives you a decent amount of free resource to play around with. For details see http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Step 2

• Go to the AWS Console page. There you will see all the services that AWS has too offer. Click on Elastic Beanstalk.
• On the Elastic Beanstalk homepage select the Generic Docker option and click Launch Now. This will create a Elastic Beanstalk application with the Amazon sample app deployed. (Be patient. It takes a few minutes.)
• Click on the link next to Default-Environment which will launch the default site.
• 

Step 3

To deploy your own dockerized app you just have to:

• zip up all the files in your project.
• Click the Upload and Deploy button and upload the zip file.

If you don’t have a dockerized app to deploy you can find one here.

Once the deployment is complete your site will be up. WIN!