RFC: Improved Windows Workload Support in Elastic Beanstalk

[mauerbac]

Summary

This RFC proposes enhancements to Windows workload support in AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Today, we are seeing fast growth of Windows workloads on EB and want to further improve the experience for customers running Windows Server, IIS, and .NET Framework/Core applications. This RFC aims to gather feedback, understand current use cases, and gather feature requests.

We recently made many Windows platform improvements that focused on deployment performance, operational tooling, and advanced IIS configurations.

A few of our recent launches:

• .NET 9 Support - .NET 9 applications on Amazon Linux 2023 (Jan 2025)
• Fast Launch Support (Jan 2025)
• SkipIISReset Flag - New option to bypass IIS resets for faster deployments (June 2025)
• PowerShell Architecture Flag - Added control over 32/64-bit execution of custom scripts (June 2025)
• Comprehensive Manifest Schema Documentation - Published detailed Windows configuration docs (June 2025)
• Multi-site IIS Support - Enabled deployments across multiple ports and host-headers (July 2025)
• Application Request Routing (ARR) Support - Added advanced routing capabilities (July 2025)

Proposed Ares of Improvements

Windows Container Support

• Native ability to deploy Windows containers on EB (like Linux/Docker support today).

Native Multiple IIS Application Support with individual deployment.

• HealthD support for multi-app/site deployments
• Ability to only update an individual website on IIS
• Better support to manage multiple applications

Run Elastic Beanstalk on Dedicated Infrastructure

• Ability to use EC2 on dedicated hosts

Managed Support for Custom AMIs

• Support customers who want to use custom AMIs within Elastic Beanstalk.
• Define an EC2 Image build component with customizations and use that for the EB AMI

Improve Platform Features

• Built-in support for Windows Authentication with a straightforward setup
• Easier configuration for SSL/TLS bindings
• Better IIS management capabilities through console
• Native session state management solutions
• Built-in staging environments with traffic splitting
• Native Active Directory Domain join support
• Fsx support

General Feedback

Please let us know in the comments about your use cases and what has been going well and what could use improvement.

A few topics:

• Would you prioritize managed simplicity (patching, telemetry, slots) or infra control (custom AMIs, full EC2 access)?
• How critical is Windows container support for your roadmap?
• How has the experience been migrating your workloads to Elastic Beanstalk?
• Has licensing and BYOL been a point of friction? Would you re-host on Linux, for example?

Thank you for your help!