Well, we have covered a lot of new features and services in this chapter, however, there are still a few things that I would recommend you try out on your own. First up is Elastic Beanstalk's advanced configurations.

As mentioned earlier, Beanstalk provides a lot of different ways for you to customize and extend your application with other AWS services using a variety of built-in services such as .ebextensions, which we covered in the previous section. One similar service that can be used to configure a Beanstalk environment's configuration is called the environment manifest file. This is a simple YAML file containing your environment's manifest configurations, such as the environment name, solution stack, and environment links to use when creating your environment. The file is placed in your application's root directory and is generally named env.yaml. One of the key uses of this file is to provide support for environment links that enable you to connect two application environments using simple names as references.

For example, if you have a website as a front-ending application that accepts certain inputs from the users, and another application that processes these inputs, you can create a link between the worker and the frontend application using this env.yml file. On invocation, the link between these two environments is set up and managed automatically by Beanstalk.

Here's a small snippet of the env.yml file's contents:

AWSConfigurationTemplateVersion: 1.1.0.0 
SolutionStack: 64bit Amazon Linux 2015.09 
EnvironmentName: frontend-environment 
EnvironmentLinks: 
  "WORKERQUEUE" : "worker-environment" 

You can learn more about Environment Manifest (env.yaml) at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/environment-cfg-manifest.html.

Alternatively, Beanstalk also provides you with an easier configuration saving mechanism, which you can invoke using either the environment dashboard or the EB CLI. This is called a Saved Configuration and can be enabled by selecting the Save configuration option under the Actions tab in your environment dashboard. Once applied, the environment configurations accept any custom configurations that are stored in an S3 bucket as an object. You can even download this configuration object and create clones of your environment using the EB CLI. To learn more about saved configurations, check out this URL: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/environment-configuration-savedconfig.html.

Another very interesting thing worth exploring is the support for Docker containers provided in Elastic Beanstalk! As you may already be aware, Docker containers are the next big thing when it comes to creating microservices-backed applications that can be deployed and scaled at tremendous scale. The Docker platform for Elastic Beanstalk has two generic configurations, a single container and multi-container option, and also provides several preconfigured container images to choose from.

From an Elastic File System perspective, one key aspect that is worth reading and exploring is the filesystem's overall performance considerations. This documentation especially highlights the different performance levels and use cases compared to EBS-provisioned IOPS volumes. The document also provides some keen insights and considerations for how to maximize the filesystem's performance. You can check out the documentation at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/performance.html.