Lumanu uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Elastic Beanstalk (from now on abbreviated as EB) helps you provision and tie together Amazon services to fairly easily get web applications and services running with push button (or command line) deploys. We’ve been using EB with a multi-container docker deploy for nearly a year now and it pretty much just works.

EB has a concept of environment tiers and there are two different types; a web tier and a worker tier. Web tier environments provide the configuration and components necessary for serving HTTP requests in a scalable fashion. Worker environments are designed to run operations that you wouldn’t want performed by your front-end serving web application.

A major difference between the two environment tiers is that a worker environment provisions a SQS queue and provides a daemon that reads from this queue and POSTs messages to an instance of your worker service. This daemon prevents your worker service from having to connect to and manage a SQS queue. By default, the daemon POSTs messages to http://localhost/. You can optionally configure it to POST to a different route.

It is possible to have different messages POST to different routes. You can do this by setting the beanstalk.sqsd.path attribute on your SQS message. For example, if you want your worker service to receive a message at /trigger-email you would set the beanstalk.sqsd.path attribute to /trigger-email.