How Can I Automatically Reference an EC2 IP in Elastic Beanstalk?

Consider using Elastic IPs for your EC2 instance! This would allow you to have a static IP address you can reference, which wouldn't change on instance rebuilds. Alternatively, using a network load balancer would also provide a consistent entry point. Just a thought, have you thought about using SQS for background task dispatch? It might offer a more robust solution depending on your app's needs.

One cool solution is to set up a private hosted zone in Route 53. You can create a private A record that points to your EC2 instance, and then use a script in the EC2 user data that updates this record with the instance's IP every time it gets recreated. That way, your Beanstalk app can just use that record instead of the IP directly.

You might want to look into using the `aws ec2 describe-instances` command with filtering to get the IP of the EC2 instance you need. You can run this via the AWS CLI or even implement it in a Python script, or directly in your app code.