There are so many things called environment:

• Rails environment: development, test, production
• Elastic Beanstalk environment
• Development environment
• Staging environment
• Production environment

An EbDeployer environment is your application running environment (= your running application + infrastructure), e.g. staging environment, production environment. All EbDeployer environments including dev environment are deployed as Rails production environment.

What is different between EbDeployer environment and Elastic Beanstalk environment?

• There are 2 level concepts in Elastic Beanstalk: Application and Environment
• EbDeployer environment sits between Elastic Beanstalk Application and Elastic Beanstalk Environment:
  • One Elastic Beanstalk Application has many EbDeployer environments: dev, staging, production, or whatever names you like.
  • Depending on deployment strategy, one EbDeployer environment has one or more Elastic Beanstalk environments
    • For 'inplace-update' deployment strategy, it's one Elastic Beanstalk environment.
    • For 'blue-green' deployment strategy, it's two Elastic Beanstalk environments.
• You should consider an Elastic Beanstalk environment is designed to be replacable (by another Elastic Beanstalk environment).