We have a static family of static websites we're thinking of hosting on Amazon Beanstalk. We currently depend on ssh access for our deployment process:
- We upload a zip file and unzip locally
unzip version.zip - We maintain symlinks to have shorter alias for some component (e.g. instead of http://oursite.com/verylongcustomername/somemoredetails we user http://oursite.com/K38da/Mc7za
- We're using quick rollback and patching on the server by editing specific files:
mv latest_ver latest_ver.bak;mv older_ver latest_verandvim foo.js
We're considering moving to Amazon Beanstalk, and so I installed and configured a sample website. I setup a symlink structure, uploading a version via scp, and edited Tomcat's configuration files. However, I'm not sure if any of these changes are maintained by the Beanstalk manager (in fact I saw some of them did not take when an instance was restarted).
Is there any way to have the Beanstalk manager remember local changes I do to the instance's filesystem, and carry that over to new instances it creates?
If the answer is no, then it seems I should forget about Beanstalk and use an EC2 image directly (I can then create an AMI that includes my custom modifications and relaunch if needed).
