Persistence of Elastic Beanstalk environment URL

Question

I am operating an Elastic Beanstalk environment with RDS and a t1.micro EC2 (classic) instance with Tomcat 7. It is the setup offered through the AWS free tier program. The environment serves as a backend for a mobile app with increasing popularity, resulting in load spikes that bring the environment into yellow and red alarm states. Therefore, I would like to scale up the Elastic Beanstalk environment.

However, the environment URL is hard-coded into the app, and I am worried about the persistence of the environment URL during configuration changes. I am considering two alternative configuration changes that I could make in the AWS console:

• Changing the environment type from single instance to load balancing, auto scaling.
• Changing the instance type from t1.micro to something larger, such as m1.small.

I am aware of the "swap environment URL" feature and that creating a new environment would give me the opportunity to work with newer generation EC2 instances like t2.micro. Still, my question is what will happen to the environment URL if I make one of the above-mentioned changes? Some assurance that the environment URL would persist may be generally useful.

Answer 1

The environment URL won't change if you do any of those changes. You specifically set the URL when creating the environment so there is no reason why it should ever change. Therefore I don't think you'll find any documentation mentioning that.

The URL might be temporarily unavailable as instances are rebuilt - if you don't do a "blue/green deployment" where you swap the environment URLs of two environments.