I'm at beginning of the investigation of AWS, but one of the concepts looks unclear to me. Based on it I want to ask for assistance with an understanding of functionality.
I have a web application on PHP installed on EC2. My application is huge loaded and I need to use a load balancer for the best performance. How to do and set up this is clear. The Code of my application is hosted on Gitlab.
After EC2 and load balancer setup did I want to use Autoscaling. So, I need to use the autoscale group.
Main question: what I should do next? As I understand I need somehow create a new instance, but I need a correct image for the instance with all dependencies and source code. Code auto-deploy is also a big question. When the new feature merged I need to run the GitLab pipeline and delivery code somehow to the new EC2.
So what do I need to read and investigate to have the ability to deploy new code to the new EC2 instance automatically? Is AWS provide some tools for this?
Thank you for the help with my journey.
Regards, Mavis.
You can begin with this link https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/create-asg-from-instance.html which explains to you how to create an autoscaling group based on an EC2 instance.
In short you can generate an AMI ( Amazon machine Image) from your current EC2 (host php) and create a launch configuration/launch template for your autoscaling group.
Next, you may add a load balancer to distribute traffic to theses instances, you can associate it with target groups and your Autoscaling goup https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/attach-load-balancer-asg.html
For the Auto deploy, you can automate within your pipeline to create a new launch configuration or to get the last version of your code PHP from S3 or another location in the user data part. You may use gitlab ci or CodeDeploy which is the perfect candidate for this kind of stuff
Be aware also, that the autoscaling group is statless(create/terminate instances) and you must store your images and assets in a shared location like S3, DB or EFS, because if an instance is unhealthy or terminated by the ASG, you may lose data.