AWS Elastic Beanstalk – Managed Platform Updates

Last night, I logged into the EC2 instance that supports this blog. Turns out that I’ve been a negligent system administrator – there were 69 updates pending!

The issue of patching and maintenance may seem trivial; however, companies spend millions of dollars keeps the underlying platforms for their enterprise systems up-to-date.

Enter the Managed Platform Updates updates to the AWS Elastic Beanstalk service. As stated on the AWS blog:

You can now choose to have your AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments automatically update to the latest version of the underlying platform running your application during a specified maintenance window. Elastic Beanstalk regularly releases new versions of supported platforms (i.e., Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python, .NET, Go, and Docker) with operating system, web & application server, and language & framework updates. Previously, you had to manually initiate updates to your Elastic Beanstalk environments using the Elastic Beanstalk console, command line interface (CLI), or API. Now, you can simply select a weekly maintenance window and have Elastic Beanstalk automatically update the platform version of your environment during that window.

It’ll be interesting to see if companies take advantage of this functionality, and if it causes a reduction in TCO for systems as they move to AWS.