Elastic Beanstalk Accidentally Taught Me EC2

I was scared of EC2.

Everyone kept saying it’s the heart of AWS, but when I looked at the dashboard…

So naturally, I ran from EC2 like it was on fire.

One day, I read about AWS Elastic Beanstalk — it claimed to deploy my app without me touching the servers.

“No need to manage infrastructure.”

YES PLEASE.

I zipped up my tiny project, uploaded it to Beanstalk, clicked "Create Environment", and felt like a cloud engineer already.

Soon, Beanstalk started doing things I didn’t ask for:

Launched an EC2 instance
Made a load balancer
Created a whole new security group
Put my code inside /var/app/current/ on a virtual machine I’d never seen before

Wait, what?
I thought I wasn’t going to touch EC2?

I clicked on the EC2 service.
Found the instance Beanstalk had launched.
Clicked around… and slowly started learning:

I didn’t plan to learn EC2 — but Beanstalk snuck it into my life like hidden veggies in pasta.

I learned what a security group was because I accidentally blocked my own IP.
I found out what instance types are when I clicked around trying to change t2.micro.
I read logs using CloudWatch because my app turned “unhealthy.”

I thought I was just deploying a project.
I ended up getting an AWS 101 — without a tutorial.

Elastic Beanstalk tricked me into learning EC2. And honestly? I’m glad it did.

I no longer fear EC2. I now understand what’s going on behind the curtain — and I didn’t have to force myself to study it from a boring PDF.

So yeah… Beanstalk got me good.
But it also made me feel like I leveled up without even trying.

I Tried to Avoid EC2… But Elastic Beanstalk Tricked Me Into Learning It