QuickStart: Deploy an ASP.NET application to Elastic Beanstalk - Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
Your Amazon accountPrerequisitesStep 1: Create a ASP.NET applicationStep 2: Run your application locallyStep 3: Deploy your ASP.NET application with the Amazon Toolkit for Visual StudioStep 4: Run your application on Elastic BeanstalkStep 5: Clean upAmazon resources for your applicationNext stepsDeploy with the console
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QuickStart: Deploy an ASP.NET application to Elastic Beanstalk

This QuickStart tutorial walks you through the process of creating a ASP.NET application and deploying it to an Amazon Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Note

This QuickStart tutorial is intended for demonstration purposes. Do not use the application created in this tutorial for production traffic.

Your Amazon account

If you're not already an Amazon customer, you need to create an Amazon account. Signing up enables you to access Elastic Beanstalk and other Amazon services that you need.

If you already have an Amazon account, you can move on to Prerequisites.

Sign up for an Amazon Web Services account

If you do not have an Amazon Web Services account, use the following procedure to create one.

To sign up for Amazon Web Services

  1. Open http://www.amazonaws.cn/ and choose Sign Up.

  2. Follow the on-screen instructions.

Amazon sends you a confirmation email after the sign-up process is complete. At any time, you can view your current account activity and manage your account by going to http://www.amazonaws.cn/ and choosing My Account.

Secure IAM users

After you sign up for an Amazon Web Services account, safeguard your administrative user by turning on multi-factor authentication (MFA). For instructions, see Enable a virtual MFA device for an IAM user (console) in the IAM User Guide.

To give other users access to your Amazon Web Services account resources, create IAM users. To secure your IAM users, turn on MFA and only give the IAM users the permissions needed to perform their tasks.

For more information about creating and securing IAM users, see the following topics in the IAM User Guide:

Prerequisites

This QuickStart tutorial walks you through creating a "Hello World" application and deploying it to an Elastic Beanstalk environment with Visual Studio and the Amazon Toolkit for Visual Studio.

Visual Studio

To download and install Visual Studio follow the instructions on the Visual Studio download page. This example uses Visual Studio 2022. During the Visual Studio installation select these specific items:

  • On the Workloads tab — select ASP.NET and web development.

  • On the Individual components tab — select .NET Framework 4.8 development tools and .NET Framework project and item templates.

Amazon Toolkit for Visual Studio

To download and set up Amazon Toolkit for Visual Studio follow the instructions in the Getting started topic of the Amazon Toolkit for Visual Studio User Guide.

Step 1: Create a ASP.NET application

Next, create an application that you'll deploy to an Elastic Beanstalk environment. We'll create a "Hello World" ASP.NET web application.

To create an ASP.NET application

  1. Launch Visual Studio. In the File menu, select New, then Project.

  2. The Create a new project dialog box displays. Select ASP.NET web application (.NET Framework), then select Next.

  3. On the Configure your new project dialog, enter eb-aspnet for your Project name. From the Framework dropdown menu select .NET Framework 4.8, then select Create.

    Note the project directory. In this example, the project directory is C:\Users\Administrator\source\repos\eb-aspnet\eb-aspnet.

  4. The Create a new ASP.NET Web Application dialogue displays. Select the Empty template. Next select Create.

    At this point, you have created an empty ASP.NET web application project using Visual Studio. Next, we'll create a web form that will serve as the entry point for the ASP.NET web application.

  5. From the Project menu, select Add New Item. On the Add New Item page, select Web Form and name it Default.aspx. Next select Add.

  6. Add the following to Default.aspx:

    <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="eb_aspnet.Default" %>

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html xmlns="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title>Hello Elastic Beanstalk!</title>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="body" runat="server">
        <div>
            Hello Elastic Beanstalk! This is an ASP.NET on Windows Server application.
        </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

Step 2: Run your application locally

In Visual Studio, from the Debug menu select Start Debugging to run your application locally. The page should display "Hello Elastic Beanstalk! This is an ASP.NET on Windows Server application."

Step 3: Deploy your ASP.NET application with the Amazon Toolkit for Visual Studio

Follow these steps to create an Elastic Beanstalk environment and deploy your new application to it.

To create an environment and deploy your ASP.NET application

  1. In Solution Explorer, right-click your application, then select Publish to Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.

  2. Choose a name for your new Elastic Beanstalk application and environment.

  3. Beyond this point, you may proceed with the defaults provided by Elastic Beanstalk or modify any of the options and settings to your liking.

  4. On the Review page, select Deploy. This will package your ASP.NET web application and deploy it to Elastic Beanstalk.

    It takes about five minutes for Elastic Beanstalk to create your environment. The Elastic Beanstalk deployment feature will monitor your environment until it becomes available with the newly deployed code. On the Env:<environment name> tab, you'll see the status for your environment.

Step 4: Run your application on Elastic Beanstalk

When the process to create your environment completes, the Env:<environment name> tab, displays information about your environment and application, including the domain URL to launch your application. Select this URL on this tab or copy and paste it into your web browser.

Congratulations! You've deployed a ASP.NET application with Elastic Beanstalk!

Step 5: Clean up

When you finish working with your application, you can terminate your environment in the Amazon Toolkit for Visual Studio.

To terminate your environment

  1. Expand the Elastic Beanstalk node and the application node in Amazon Explorer. Right-click your application environment and select Terminate Environment.

  2. When prompted, select Yes to confirm that you want to terminate the environment. It will take a few minutes for Elastic Beanstalk to terminate the Amazon resources running in the environment.

Amazon resources for your application

You just created a single instance application. It serves as a straightforward sample application with a single EC2 instance, so it doesn't require load balancing or auto scaling. For single instance applications Elastic Beanstalk creates the following Amazon resources:

  • EC2 instance – An Amazon EC2 virtual machine configured to run web apps on the platform you choose.

    Each platform runs a different set of software, configuration files, and scripts to support a specific language version, framework, web container, or combination thereof. Most platforms use either Apache or nginx as a reverse proxy that processes web traffic in front of your web app, forwards requests to it, serves static assets, and generates access and error logs.

  • Instance security group – An Amazon EC2 security group configured to allow incoming traffic on port 80. This resource lets HTTP traffic from the load balancer reach the EC2 instance running your web app. By default, traffic is not allowed on other ports.

  • Amazon S3 bucket – A storage location for your source code, logs, and other artifacts that are created when you use Elastic Beanstalk.

  • Amazon CloudWatch alarms – Two CloudWatch alarms that monitor the load on the instances in your environment and are triggered if the load is too high or too low. When an alarm is triggered, your Auto Scaling group scales up or down in response.

  • Amazon CloudFormation stack – Elastic Beanstalk uses Amazon CloudFormation to launch the resources in your environment and propagate configuration changes. The resources are defined in a template that you can view in the Amazon CloudFormation console.

  • Domain name – A domain name that routes to your web app in the form subdomain.region.eb.amazonaws.com.cn.

Elastic Beanstalk manages all of these resources. When you terminate your environment, Elastic Beanstalk terminates all the resources that it contains.

Next steps

After you have an environment running an application, you can deploy a new version of the application or a different application at any time. Deploying a new application version is very quick because it doesn't require provisioning or restarting EC2 instances. You can also explore your new environment using the Elastic Beanstalk console. For detailed steps, see Explore your environment in the Getting started chapter of this guide.

Try more tutorials

If you'd like to try other tutorials with different example applications, see QuickStart for .NET Core on Windows.

After you deploy a sample application or two and are ready to start developing and running ASP.NET applications locally, see Setting up your .NET development environment

Deploy with the Elastic Beanstalk console

You can also use the Elastic Beanstalk console to launch the sample application. For detailed steps, see Create an example application in the Getting started chapter of this guide.