This guide will set up a production ready, highly available cluster of packagecloud:enterprise instances using only components within AWS.

AWS Components used:

Route 53 for domain name management
S3 for repository storage
RDS for database
VPC for networking between components
Amazon Certificate Manager for managing HTTPS certificates
Elastic Load Balancer for distributing incoming traffic to our cluster
Amazon Workmail for verifying our domain (needed for Amazon Certificate Manager)
EC2 for running our frontend instances
Elasticache for running our work queue
Autoscaling Groups for ensuring our cluster remains up and running at all times

Table of contents:

Installation Steps

Step 1: Registering a Route53 Domain / Getting HTTPS Certificate

Route53 has a unique integration with Elastic Load Balancer that makes routing requests to our cluster a lot simpler. We recommend a Route53 even if you already have a domain you plan to use.

Register a Route53 Domain

For this guide we'll be using the domain name my-pcloud.be

Request Certificate

Receive Certificate Validation Email

In order for the Amazon issued certificate to work, we need to click on the validation link that Amazon sends to the following addresses:

administrator@your_domain

hostmaster@your_domain

postmaster@your_domain

webmaster@your_domain

admin@your_domain

The easiest way to receive this email on a Route 53 domain is to temporarily setup AWS Workmail.

Setting up AWS Workmail

Proving Ownership of Domain

Configure your Route53 records to match the values desired by the AWS Workmail verification screen. Note that 'Hostname' field already contains your domain name, but the interface for Route53 already suffixes your domain for you. Ensure you only copy+paste up to your domain. For example:

Final result:

If all your Record sets were configured correctly, then you should see this:

Create the hostmaster user

Inside of AWS Workmail, add a user named hostmaster (this is the email that receives the validation email from the Certificate Manager)

Go to Organization Settings to get the login URL for your organization

Login as the hostmaster user with the password given above

After logging in, go back to the Certificate Manager, and resend the validation email

After hitting Resend, you should an email from Amazon Certificates

Open the email and approve the Certificate.

Now we have a working Domain and Certificate! Feel free to delete the AWS Workmail account and organization.

Step 2: Create VPC and two subnets

We're going to create a VPC with two subnets, since we'll be using a minimum of two availability zones. We will be using us-east-1d and us-east-1b.

Create the first subnet, on the 10.0.0.0/24 block:

Create the second subnet, in another availability zone from the first subnet, on the 10.0.1.0/24 block:

Final result should be two subnets in two different availability zones.

Step 3: Create Security Groups

Frontend security group

RDS security group

Redis security group

ELB security group

Step 4: Create MySQL RDS Database

Note: Leave the database name blank, one will be created for you.

Step 5: Create Elasticache Instance

Create a subnet group

Make sure you click 'Add all the subnets' link to fill out the subnet/zone mapping:

Create Redis instance

Step 6: Launch EC2 Instance

Step 7: Install packagecloud:enterprise

Follow the guide for Single Node Setup paying special attention to the External Database, External Redis, and Session Secret options.

Step 8: Configure Elastic Load Balancer

Create a Resource Alias to the Elastic Load Balancer

Step 9: Create Autoscaling Group

Create Image from Running EC2 instance

Create Launch Configuration

Configure the Security Group

Create Auto Scaling Group

Troubleshooting

If the site is not working, make sure the instances registered for that load balancer are healthy (this may take a few minutes). Amazon will only forward requests to healthy instances.

High Availability Setup (AWS)