Story Time: "The instance profile aws-elasticbeanstalk-ec2-role associated with the environment does not exist"

Thank you for sharing your experience with creating an Elastic Beanstalk environment. You're correct in your observation that AWS no longer automatically creates the "aws-elasticbeanstalk-ec2-role" instance profile. This change was implemented due to recent AWS security guidelines that prevent AWS services from automatically creating roles with trust policies to other AWS services, such as EC2 in this case.

The error message you encountered is not a bug, but rather a result of these updated security practices. However, the confusion you experienced is understandable, especially if you've worked with Elastic Beanstalk before when this role was automatically created.

You're not being an idiot at all - the process has indeed changed, and it's not immediately obvious how to proceed. The correct approach, which you eventually figured out, is to manually create the instance profile and associated role with the necessary permissions.

While you managed to resolve the issue by creating a role named "aws-elasticbeanstalk-ec2-role", you should be able to use a role with any name, as long as it has the correct permissions and trust relationship. The key steps are:

1. Create an IAM role for EC2.
2. Attach the necessary policies (like AWSElasticBeanstalkWebTier, AWSElasticBeanstalkWorkerTier).
3. Set up the correct trust relationship for EC2.
4. Create an instance profile and associate it with the role.

If you're still having trouble using a custom-named role, you might want to double-check that you've completed all these steps, particularly creating the instance profile and associating it with your role.

For future reference, you can also use the AWS CLI to create the instance profile and add the role to it, which some users have found helpful when facing similar issues.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. While it's not a bug, your feedback highlights that this change in process could be communicated more clearly to users. Your experience will help improve the guidance provided to other AWS customers in similar situations.
Sources
Role created to use as EC Instance Profile for Elastic Beanstalk not working | AWS re:Post
Your AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment security - AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Managing Elastic Beanstalk instance profiles - AWS Elastic Beanstalk