Working with Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk

I decided to start using Amazon cloud services.

There is a pretty instresting solution Amazon Beastalk, which you should consider.

There is a lot of documentation, but as normal, there are always pseudo dark steps not thoroughly documented.

For intance, when you arrive to "Develop, Test, and Deploy" section of the "AWS Elastic Beanstalk" documentation, there is a step, name #1 quite obscure:

1.- From your Git repository directory, type the following command.

git aws.config

Nowhere it is told that you must previously 'set up your gir repository' as described here.

I also encountered what I think is a bug regarding timezones on Amazon's service, which was easily fixed. Following the README of the "AWS Command line tools". I got this error:


 $ elastic-beanstalk-describe-applications
Service returned an error.
Type: Sender
Code: RequestExpired
Message: Request has expired. Timestamp date: 2012-06-02T14:44:13-04:30

Strangely, this happened because I had my ubuntu virtual box configured to show time as in my timezone (-04:30), while the EC2 instance (at least that's we're I checked) showed in UTC format.

So I decided to change my locale to UTC, 

doing
 $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

I had to select "ETC", and then "UTC"...

Done that, the command "elastic-beanstalk-describe-applications" ran without problems. showing my applications.

Then I continued following the beanstalk documentation and did
git aws.config
git aws.push

The only problem I encountered after doing this is that I realized that Amazon Beanstalk doesn't support Git Submodules !! So I had to make a new directory, copy all my application there, do a new complete repository with all the code and push it to amazon. At first I was kind of reluctant to do this, but then I started to think that it was not that bad ... (I also didn't have other options : )

I realized that my app was configured to always redirect to https protocol (secure http) (this gave me a lot of headaches, because if Beanstalk is not configured to work with SSL then the Health Check URL didn't work at all because of the difference http/https... ). So I decided to buy a $13 SSL certificate from godaddy (they cost this if you click on their ad after a google search, not if you enter directy to godaddy).

I wanted to configure mydomain.com instead of www.mydomain.com, and also to use Amazon Route 53. This was not a problem with the current documentation at Amazon.