Follow these steps to enable gzip on Amazon EBS

Step 1:

  1. Create a top-level directory named .ebextensions in your source bundle.
  2.  And create two files in it as shown below.

The contents of enable_mod_deflate.conf

# mod_deflate configuration
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
# Restrict compression to these MIME types
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml+rss
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/png
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/gif
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/jpeg

# Level of compression (Highest 9 - Lowest 1)
DeflateCompressionLevel 9

# Netscape 4.x has some problems.
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</IfModule>

</IfModule>

The contents of myapp.config

container_commands:
    01_setup_apache:
        command: "cp .ebextensions/enable_mod_deflate.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/enable_mod_deflate.conf"

Step 2:

  1. Connect to your EC2 instance
  2. Restart Apache server with the following command

$ sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart 

Step 3:

Head straight to HTTP Compression Test to check if your server is sending out compressed data.

Kick ass.