AWS continues to enhance developer flexibility and security! Elastic Beanstalk now gives users full control over security group configuration during application deployment—bringing a long-awaited feature to the platform.

🚀 What’s New?

With this update, you can now choose to use custom security groups instead of relying on the default ones provided by Elastic Beanstalk. This change applies to:

  • EC2 instances in all environment types
  • Load balancers in load-balanced environments

Previously, Beanstalk would automatically attach a default security group, which often required manual updates post-deployment. Now, you can define custom security policies from the start—no more post-deploy patchwork.

🔒 Why This Matters

This update significantly improves:

  • Security posture: Apply your organization’s security policies right from deployment.
  • Network control: Fine-tune which resources can communicate with your app.
  • Consistency: Align Beanstalk deployments with your existing VPC security configurations.

Whether you're deploying internal apps, staging environments, or internet-facing workloads, this feature provides greater transparency and security control.

🛠️ How to Use It

When launching or updating an environment, you can now:

  • Specify custom security groups in your Elastic Beanstalk configuration (via console, CLI, or config files).
  • Skip the default security group by opting out during setup.
  • Apply this to both new and existing environments.

✅ Use Case Example

Let’s say your company uses strict ingress rules and IAM-bound VPC security groups for internal APIs. With this new feature:

  • You can deploy Elastic Beanstalk environments that conform to those policies.
  • Avoid manually removing default groups or editing rules post-deployment.
  • Automate deployment securely via Infrastructure-as-Code tools.

💬 Final Thoughts

This may seem like a small change—but for DevOps teams and cloud architects, it’s a huge win for security and automation. It also brings Elastic Beanstalk more in line with other AWS services that already support fine-grained security group configuration.

Are you still using Elastic Beanstalk in 2025? Will this change impact your deployment workflows?