Hey Pat, sorry I know this post was forever ago now but I was never quite able to figure out a solution for this, currently we just turned searching off on our app but that's far from desirable.
I'm fairly new to the world of dev-ops so I don't think I was asking the right question in my first message. Originally I was trying to install Thinking Sphinx on every new instance launched by Elastic Beanstalk, but this would be a poor way of doing it, correct? Because then every new instance has different indexes?
What I want to do now is set up a server that runs the Sphinx client, and our app makes search requests to this server. This way searching is not tied to the auto scaling environment.
I guess my questions are is this possible? And if yes how can I tell my rails app to point to this new server?
Thanks for the help!
Evan