My AWS Elastic Beanstalk Environment is stuck in Health: Grey.

My application is working, I can access it fine. However, I am unable to change configuration or deploy new versions because I get a message saying that

Environment named ______ is in an invalid state for this operation. Mustbe Ready.

If I run eb health on my console, I get the following output:

Status: Ready Health Grey

And

ELB State: InService

Is there anything I can try to revive my environment? I have contacted AWS Support, by they are really slow. Another option I can think of is terminating the environment and creating a new one, but I really would prefer to avoid that.

EB can be fairly tough to trouble shoot when you have full access to EB, the instances, the ELB’s, etc… never mind trying to proxy this through SO.

I’d do the following:

• Bring up a new environment under the same application
• When it comes up green, use the EB application “Swap” functionality to swap the environments

More details on this process is here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features.CNAMESwap.html

This performs a DNS switch so you should have no down time. You’ll still the old environment running if you want to troublshoot it later with your friendly AWS support staff.

The only negatives are:

• You’ll continue paying for both environment stacks while waiting to troubleshoot the other.
• The DNS is a little tough as you can’t guarantee clients respect the short time-outs EB DNS entries have. They should, but someone may decide to keep using a local cached version. As with anything relying on trusting client-side features, it’s a bit out of your control.
• If you deploy a RDS DB via EB, you can’t us the swap as the DB is tied to the environment (NEVER deploy a RDS DB in production EB environment via EB!!!!)