How to start out with automated scripted deployment? Help

Hi,

Have you manually setup load balancing and EC2 instances, or do you use ElasticBeansTalk? If you will use AWS then I would suggest ElasticBeanstalk as your applilcation manager.

Regarding "general" scaled Laravel setup,

Assets and storage should be shared. ( That I assume you are aware ) CI/CD workflow basically consists of getting the code packed and pushed to the servers.

Lets say you have fixed number of servers behind loadbalancer.

Setup a cronjob that will check your GIT repo and pull the changes, do the necessary commands like composer npm artisan and any other specific to your project.

That is basic approach which works well.

Now if you have dynamic scaling, then you could do the same approach just add needed commands in startup script cloud-init.

You should store your variables somewhere for the servers to fetch them.

One approach is to use ready made tools liek Gitlab CI/CD pipelines.

I would not go to Docker as a solution just because it is "modern" and is hyped everywhere. Depends on your needs but you will not gain anything with simply deciding to go with docker until you grasp of your entire automation workflow.

CloudFormation is a templating language which provisions AWS services.

ElasticBeansTalk is a free tool which provisions CloudFormation script and sets everything for you. Afterwards, you simply upload ZIP archive of your application and it automagically deploys to all instances. It also takes care of autoscaling for you.

If you will use AWS go for ElasticBeansTalk.

I am using it for bunch of PHP Laravel apps.

Thanks for your info.

Currently I am setting everything up manually. Then for my Ec2 I am provisioning with a custom server provisioning script via Laravel forge. Laravel forge also handles the code deployments, queues, cron and everything else.

From what I have looked at, elastic beanstalk wont work with forge unless Im mistaken. I have spent a few days playing around with aws cloud formations, I think I should be able to script out the architecture exactly as I set it out manually using formations. It is pretty complex though so will take me a while to get my head around all the settings.

If that goes to plan, I will then look at perhaps using forge apis, to hook into the ec2s and provision etc.

Question about beanstalk though.. If using beanstalk do you stull have access to all the underlying servers, rds etc or is it all contained in 1. Beanstalk sounds like a nice solution but i'm not sure how I could make it work with my current setup.

Have you mentioned Forge in your original question?

Is Forge ultimate tool for you?

Forge does not handle Cron, queues.

ElasticBeansTalk is management tool, not a service.

I am not sure how you are not sure that ElasticBeanstalk cannot work with your current setup.

After looking at this post: https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/servers/using-aws-elastic-beanstalk I was lead to believe that forge and beanstalk wouldn't work together.

Forge does handle cron and queues, really well and other useful things which allow management of servers/sites easily. So i guess, yes as I am using forge heavily I would like to continue.