Stretchy Beanstalk environment stuck on gray health

Question

My AWS Elastic Beanstalk Environment is stuck in Health: Gray.

My application is working, I can access it in order. However, I can’t change the configuration or deploy new versions, because I get a message that

An environment named ______ is in an invalid state for this operation. Mustbe Ready.

If I run eb health on my console, I get the following output:

Status: Ready to work. Gray.

and

ELB Status: InService

Is there anything that I can try to revitalize my environment? I contacted AWS support because they are very slow. Another option I can think of is to shut down the environment and create a new one, but I would rather avoid this.

Answer 1

EB can be quite difficult to fix the problem when you have full access to EB, instances, ELB, etc ... don't try to proxy it through SO.

I would do the following:

• Connect the new environment in the application
• When it turns green, use EB application swap functionality to replace environments

More on this here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features.CNAMESwap.html

This performs a DNS switch, so you should not have downtime. You will continue to work with the old environment if you want to discuss it later with your friendly AWS support staff.

The only negatives:

• You will continue to pay for both environment stacks, waiting for other issues to be fixed.
• DNS is a little tough, since you cannot guarantee that clients observe short timeouts of EB DNS records. They should, but someone might decide to use the local cached version. As with anything that relies on trusting features on the client side, it will get a little out of control.
• If you deploy an RDS database through EB, you cannot exchange us because the DB is tied to the environment (NEVER deploy an RDS database in an EB environment produced by EB through EB !!!!)