With the development environment all set and working, it is now time to go ahead and create a production environment. Now, technically, you could repeat all the processes that we followed earlier for the development environment creation, and that would work out well indeed, but Elastic Beanstalk offers a really simple and minimalistic approach to creating new environments while using an existing one as a template. The process is call cloning, and it can be performed in a few simple clicks, using the environment dashboard itself:

1. To get started, simply select the Actions tab from the environment dashboard page and select the option Clone Environment. This will bring up the New Environment page, as shown here:

2. Here, start off by providing an Environment name for the new environment, followed by a unique prefix for the Environment URL. Remember, this is a clone from the earlier development environment that we created, so, by default, it will contain the same Amazon Linux instance with the WordPress application that we pushed in during the Dev stages. This is not a concern as we can always use the EB CLI to push the production version of the application as well. But for now, fill in the rest of the details and select the Clone option.

The new environment undergoes the same initialization and creation process as it did earlier, creating separate security groups, assigning a new Elastic IP, and launching a new EC2 instance with the same application version that was pushed in the development environment.

Once completed, you should now have two very similar environments up and running side by side, but isn't a production environment supposed to be more than just one instance? Well, that's precisely what we will be configuring in the next section.