Web site architecture on AWS's Elastic Beanstalk

Question

We have 3 components that we want to map to our domain like this:

• a static website: example.com
• an asp.net app used for account settings: example.com/account
• some .net webservices used in other apps: example.com/web

We want to use AWS's Elastic Beanstalk to host the entire structure, preferably in the same environment.

And if we were to have all the components in the same Visual Studio project, it would be quite easy. But the static website is prone to a lot of changes and we don't want those changes directly pushed to production to mess with the other 2 components.

The best scenario for us would be to have 3 separate VS projects, each of them publishing separately and independently to the EBS environment:

• the static websites VS project should be able to publish in the root w/o interfering with the /account and /web folders
• the ASP.NET user account VS project should be able to publish directly to /account without messing with the root files
• the .NET webservices VS project should be able to publish directly to /web without messing with the root files

My questions:

1. Is this possible? And if there is a way, how should we deal with versioning?
2. Should we use other AWS services that can help us reach our goal architecture?

Our fallback plan is to host the static website in S3 and use subdomains for the apps: account.example.com and web.example.com.

Answer 1

For your requirements I would suggest using S3 for static website, and Elastic Beanstalk for other 2 components.

Here one more decision you have to take is either to use a single Beanstalk Environment or Multiple. This decision you can take based the requirements for scalability of each service running in Benastalk.

Another important service you can use is AWS Cloudfront, to be used infront of all 3 components, which can be configured to do the url routing for example.com/ and also cache static content in edge locations. This will also help to setup SSL certificates if needed (Which is free for CloudFront). Also if you use Cloudfront you don't need subdomains, which works best for web apps since it don't need CORS with preflight requests.