Pause an Elastic Beanstalk app environment?

Question

I want to shut down the app servers while I upgrade the database.

Is there a way to pause or stop the app servers without terminating/destroying the environment?

Can I just go to the Elastic Beanstalk load balancer and change that temporarily without any issues or consequences to the Elastic Beanstalk configurations or the way it manages its servers?

Answer 1

This is the only method that worked for me.

1) Go to the environment you want to pause on AWS Management Console

2) Select "Configuration"

3) Open "Capacity"

4) Scroll all the way down to "Time-based Scaling"

5) Click the "Add schedule action" button

6) Set the action to few minutes in the future (recommended: 5 minutes so environment has time to reset), give it a name (for example "terminate") and set minimum and maximum instances to '0':

Note that times are set in UTC. You can use time.is/UTC to determine the current UTC.

This would create an error that would shut down your environment so you won't have to pay for it. Any other methods suggested just create a error at time of applying so it doesn't pass through and environment would still work.

To re-enable the environment, just schedule another action with instance min 1 and max 4 for example (those are the defaults).