Heroku is a Platform as a Service (PaaS), where you can deploy and manage your Ruby on Rails applications. It is one of the easiest platforms to deploy to; allowing you to focus on the development side of things instead of worrying about managing an infrastructure.

Health Checks are an important part of monitoring an application's health. However, a simple status response may not be sufficient. In this episode, we look at creating a health check which monitors some dependencies of a Rails application.

Back in Episode #106, we configured and deployed to a very simple AWS Beanstalk environment. However, in this episode, we take things a bit further and explore security groups, an existing database and redis service. Also, there are a few changes that we have to do in order to get Rails 6 working within Beanstalk.

Sometimes your AWS Beanstalk environment may require configuration changes from your app to properly deploy and get everything working.

We’re going to get a Ruby on Rails application running on a staging environment on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The Rails app will be connected to a MySQL database instance.