I've started to play with AWS cloud computing. When I'm starting with any new technology, the best way how to learn it, is to use it for some project. And because I participate in one open-source project, where we develop multi-cloud application which can run, scale and auto migrate among various cloud providers, I've decided to do a Proof of Concept in AWS.
The open-source software I'm going to deploy is FlexBook and is available on GitHub.
Below is the logical infrastructure design of AWS infrastructure for deployment of webscale application.
My first PoC is using following AWS resources
- 1x AWS Region
- 1x AWS VPC
- 1x AWS Availability Zone
- 1x AWS Internet Gateway
- 1x AWS Public Segment
- 1x AWS Private Segment
- 1x AWS NAT Gateway
- 6x EC Instances
- 1x FlexBook Ingress Controller - NGINX used as L7 load balancer redirecting ingress traffic to particualar FlexBook node
- 1x WebPortal - NGINX used as web server for static portal page using JavaScript components leveraging REST API communication to FlexBook cluster (3 FlexBook nodes which can auto scale if necessary)
- 1x FlexBook Manager - responsible for FlexBook cluster management including deployment, auto-scale, application distributed resource management, etc.
- 3x FlexBook Node - this is where multi-tenant FlexBook application is running. App tenants can be migrated across FlexBook nodes.
For all EC2 instances I'm going to use my favorite operating system - FreeBSD.
I've realized, that AWS EC2 instances do not support console access, therefore, ssh is the only way how to log in to servers. You can generate SSH Key Pair during EC2 deployment and download private key (PEM) to your computer. AWS shows you how to connect to your EC2 instance. This is what you see in instructions:
ssh -i "flxb-mgr.pem" root@ec2-32-7-14-5.eu-central-1.compute.amazonaws.com
However, command above does not work for FreeBSD. AWS tells you following information ...
Note: In most cases, the guessed user name is correct. However, read your AMI usage instructions to check if the AMI owner has changed the default AMI user name.And that's the point. The default username for FreeBSD AWS AMIs is ec2-user, therefore, following command will let you connect to AWS EC2 FreeBSD instance.
ssh -i "flxb-mgr.pem" ec2-user@ec2-32-7-14-5.eu-central-1.compute.amazonaws.com
When you SSH to the ec2-user, you can su to a root account which does not have any password.
Here are best practices for production usage
- set a root password
- remove the ec2-user account and create your own account with your SSH own keys
That's it for now. I will continue with AWS discovery and potential production use of AWS for some FlexBook projects.
Sources and additional resources:
