Make a new EC2 instance on Elastic Beanstalk

Question

I deployed my app onto Elastic Beanstalk. I have a few questions related to the EC2 instances:

• By running en ssh, I understand that I will ssh onto one of the instances. What if there is more than one instance?

• There is a warning, that changes made to the machine via SSH won't necessarily stick. I have some extra scripts that I run when I deploy (installing extra software in case it isn't there). But... how do I check that my script works? Is there a way to restore the EC2 instance to its initial state without launching a 'Rebuild environment'? At least I can test if my hook works

• In fact, if I have 2 or more EC2 instances, how do I know which one I ssh'd into? Or, do they share the same file system? Or... how does it actually all work, in terms of respawning, recreating, etc?

Answer 1

1) If you have more than one EC running, eb ssh actually asks you which one you want to connect to.

2) To see if my script worked, I went to the EC2 console and forcefully terminated the two running instances. This forced Amazon to make new ones -- from there, I could see that everything did work, and my custom scripts actually ran.

Amazon AWS seems to be a very difficult topic to get answers for -- even on Amazon's own forums!