🚀 30+ AWS Lab Challenge – Part 1: Hosting with Elastic Beanstalk

After earning my AWS Certified Developer – Associate certification 🎓, I wanted to push myself beyond just theory.

That’s why I started a personal challenge: 30+ AWS Labs — one service at a time, hands-on, step by step.

This is Part 1 of that challenge: AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

🌱 What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Think of Elastic Beanstalk as a gardener for your app.

You bring your app (like seeds 🌱).
Beanstalk plants it, waters it, and makes sure it grows in healthy soil (servers, scaling, monitoring).
You don’t need to worry about the hard stuff like EC2 setup, load balancers, or scaling. AWS does that for you.

It’s one of the easiest ways to deploy apps on AWS without being a DevOps expert.

🛠️ Step-by-Step Lab

1️⃣ Create a React app

For this lab, I used Lovable.dev (a no-code AI tool) to generate a sample project: a luxury tennis club app where users can book courts.

Then I refined the project locally with VS Code + GitHub.

2️⃣ Prepare the project

Build your app with npm run build.
Add a Procfile that tells Beanstalk how to run the app.
Zip your dist, package.json, Procfile, and configs.

3️⃣ Create an environment in Elastic Beanstalk

Choose Web Server (for websites) or Worker (for background jobs).
Elastic Beanstalk will handle EC2, load balancers, and scaling for you.

4️⃣ Configure service access

Elastic Beanstalk runs on EC2 behind the scenes, so:

Service Role → allows Beanstalk to manage AWS resources.
Instance Profile → gives EC2 instances permissions (like pulling logs or accessing S3).
Optional: Add an SSH Key if you want to log in to your EC2 instance later.