Launching EC2 images in Amazon EC2

Note: If you came here from the Amazon subscription pipeline, the activation key is not required because just like our other build targets, our Amazon EC2 AMI's are 100% open source with no proprietary restrictions.

Overview

There are many advantages to using Amazon EC2 to deploy TurnKey Linux appliances on-demand:

• It's fast: launch an appliance into a high performance cloud in just minutes.
• It's convenient: No additional hardware or software is required.
• It's cost effective: Less than $0.1/hour (8.5¢) and you only pay for what you use.
• Nothing to download: this is especially useful with our larger appliances (e.g., Zimbra).
  
• Simple: Basic usage can be managed from a web browser.
• Powerful: can be managed and automated from a powerful API.
  

If you have not yet subscribed to the appliance you want to deploy on EC2, please do so now by going to the appliance page and clicking on the "launch to cloud -> Amazon EC2 AMI" link. This will take you to a sign-up form on Amazon. If you do not have an Amazon EC2 account one will be created for you. After subscribing you will be redirected from Amazon back to this page.

Pricing

Update: We've decided to let users try out TurnKey on EC2 for free while we solicit more feedback from the community on pricing here. For now you'll only be paying the regular Amazon EC2 usage fees:

Less than $0.1/hour (8.5¢/hour to be precise)

Getting started

EC2 has many powerful features, which can make it confusing for new users.

This tutorial does not assume previous experience with EC2. We'll be demonstrating how to launch TurnKey LAMP appliance on EC2 using Amazon's management console but the principles are the same even if you use a different interface such as the ElasticFox FireFox extension or Amazon's command line API.

If you're a more experienced EC2 user you may want to skip down to the part where we set up EBS volume for data persistence.

Launching an instance

Log into the Amazon web console.

Launch instance wizard

Select the region where you want to launch an instance (US or EU).

Click on the Lauch Instances button which launches the Launch Instance Wizard.

Select the community AMIs tab. Entering "turnkey" into the text box will give you a list of available TurnKey Linux appliances.

To select the AMI you subscribed to, enter its codename:

Create SSH keypair

Amazon will prompt you to create an SSH keypair you can use later to log into your instance.

Firewall security groups

If you haven't set up a firewall security group the wizard will create a new group that only allows port 22.

Note that to access the full range of services available on your appliance instance you'll later have to add additional ports to the security group.

Finalize and launch

Opening additional ports

Go to the security groups panel.

Here you may want to open any of the following ports:

Accessing a running instance

Go to instances panel. Clicking on the instance shows its public IP address

"Instance actions -> Connect" shows how you can use the keypair to login with SSH.

You can also log in with the initial root password, which is available in the output of the system log (Instance Actions -> System Log). It's long so you may want to change it to something shorter if you're going to be using webmin or the Ajax web shell.

The initial root password (as well as the MySQL:root and PostgreSQL:postgres where applicable) are set randomly on firstboot for security reasons, and is available in /root/README.

Setting up an EBS volume for data persistence

Go to "Volumes" panel

Create a volume. Make sure you create it in exactly the same availability zone as your instance otherwise you won't be able to attach it to the instance.

Attach it to your instance.

The new volume is "hotplugged" to your instance on the fly (it shows up as device /dev/sdf).

First-time formatting

Log into a shell command line and execute the following commands:

mkdir /vol
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdf
mount /dev/sdf /vol

apt-get update

# (I.e., in TurnKey LAMP this installs ebsmount-scripts-lamp)
# please note that the ebsmount-scripts are highly experimental
apt-get install ebsmount-scripts-$(cat /etc/hostname.orig)

umount /dev/sdf

# starts the ebsmount service
/etc/init.d/ebsmount start

You can now safely terminate your appliance instance and your data will survive.

How it works

When launched the ebsmount service shuts down running services, mounts the EBS volume and then mount --bind a list of directories (e.g., /etc, /var/lib/mysql) on the instance to directories inside the EBS volume. Which filesystem locations are mounted to the EBS volume varies from appliance to appliance which is why each appliance has its own ebsmount hooks (e.g., ebsmount-scripts-lamp).

If you are mounting a newly created EBS volume then ebsmount will first migrate the instance's data to the EBS volume.

Attaching an instance to a previously created EBS volume

Unfortunately Amazon doesn't yet make it easy to start an instance with the EBS volume already attached. This means attaching an instance to an EBS volume via the AWS management console is a bit cumbersome. We're working on tools to automate this.

Meanwhile to remount an EBS volume to a new instance attach the EBS volume (e.g., using the Amazon web management console) and restart the ebsmount service:

/etc/init.d/ebsmount restart