Deployment

Deploy Cerbos on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Run the Cerbos PDP alongside your application on Elastic Beanstalk using Docker or multi-container environments.

Multi-container

Run Cerbos alongside your application in a multi-container Docker environment managed by Elastic Beanstalk

Auto-scaling

Cerbos scales automatically with your Elastic Beanstalk environment as instances are added or removed

Managed platform

Let Elastic Beanstalk handle provisioning, load balancing, and health monitoring while Cerbos handles authorization

What is Cerbos?

Cerbos is an open-source authorization layer that decouples access control from your application code. It runs as a stateless Policy Decision Point (PDP) that evaluates fine-grained policies at request time.

Authorization policies are written in human-readable YAML supporting RBAC, ABAC, and conditional rules. They can be updated, tested, and deployed independently of your application.

Deploying Cerbos via Amazon Elastic Beanstalk gives you a production-ready authorization service that scales horizontally and fits naturally into your existing infrastructure and observability stack.

Policy-as-codeHuman-readable YAML policies managed like source code Scalable PDPStateless policy decision point with sub-millisecond latency Centralized managementManage, test, and deploy policies from a single control plane

How to deploy Cerbos on Elastic Beanstalk

Create a Dockerrun.aws.json, Define a multi-container configuration that includes the official Cerbos container image alongside your application container.
Configure policy loading, Set environment variables to point Cerbos at a Git repository or Cerbos Hub for policy storage.
Deploy the environment, Upload the configuration to Elastic Beanstalk and launch the environment.
Connect your application, Use a Cerbos SDK to send authorization checks to Cerbos running on localhost within the same instance.

FAQ

How do I deploy Cerbos on Elastic Beanstalk?

Use a multi-container Docker environment in Elastic Beanstalk. Add the Cerbos container alongside your application container in a Dockerrun.aws.json file.

Does Cerbos require any external dependencies?

No. Cerbos is fully stateless and requires no database or message queue. Policies can be loaded from a Git repository or Cerbos Hub.

Can Cerbos scale with Elastic Beanstalk auto-scaling?

Yes. When running as a sidecar container in the same environment, Cerbos scales automatically with your application instances. Each instance gets its own Cerbos PDP.