Beanstalk Q: What's the difference between a config update and a deployment?

Hi, Yes, there is a difference between a configuration update and a deployment in AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Deployment: This is the process of deploying new application code to your Elastic Beanstalk environment. When you deploy new application code, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. During the deployment process, Elastic Beanstalk will also execute .ebextensions and container_commands as part of the deployment lifecycle.

Configuration Update: This refers to making changes to the settings of your environment, such as updating the software stack, changing the instance type, or modifying the environment variables. When you perform a configuration update, Elastic Beanstalk will apply those changes to all instances of your application. However, this doesn't trigger a full deployment and therefore will not execute container_commands. container_commands are only run during the application deployment process, not during a configuration update.

This is the reason why you are observing the difference. When a configuration update is done, it doesn't run the container_commands in the .config files and therefore, the results from the container_commands aren't there.

To ensure all steps are run during a configuration update, you might need to manually initiate a deployment after the configuration update. This could be done by creating a new application version and updating the environment to use the new version.