How can I deploy a web process and a worker process with Elastic Beanstalk (node.js)?

Question

My heroku Procfile looks like:

web: coffee server.coffee
scorebot: npm run score

So within the same codebase, I have 2 different types of process that will run. Is there an equivalent to doing this with Elastic Beanstalk?

Answer 1

Generally speaking Amazon gives you much more control than Heroku. With great power comes great responsibility. That means that with the increased power comes increased configuration steps. Amazon performs optimizations (both technical and billing) based on what tasks you're performing. You configure web or worker environments separately and deploy to them separately. Heroku does this for you but in some cases you may not want to deploy both at once. Amazon leaves that configuration up to you.

Now, don't get me wrong, you might see this as a feature of a heroku, but in advanced configurations you might have entire teams working on and redeploying workers independent from your web tier. This means that the default on Amazon is basically that you set up two completely separate apps that might happen to share source code (but don't have to).

Basically the answer to your question is no, there is not something that will allow you to do what you're asking in as simple a manor as with Heroku. That doesn't mean it is impossible, it just means you need to set up your environments yourself instead of Heroku doing it for you.

For more info see:

Worker "dyno" in AWS Elastic Beanstalk

http://colintoh.com/blog/configure-worker-for-aws-elastic-beanstalk