Scalable Internet Systems Demo Application

This application will demonstrate many of the concepts introduced in this class.

Git tags are used to indicate various points of progression.

Project Name: Demo

Team Members: Bryce Boe (@bboe)

Table of Contents

• Preparing this Rails Application for Elastic Beanstalk
• Preparing Your Application for Elastic Beanstalk
• Creating Elastic Beanstalk Deployments
• Modifying Running Deployments

Preparing this Rails Application for Elastic Beanstalk

I've set up a linux server on Amazon EC2 that you can utilize for easy interaction with elasticbeanstalk. (Alternatively, you could set up the CLI for elastic beanstalk on your local machine.)

1. SSH into that server using the provided TEAMNAME.pem file:

    ssh -i TEAMNAME.pem TEAMNAME@ec2.cs291.com
   

2. On the EC2 instance you just ssh'd into, take note of your aws-access-id and aws-secret-key which can be found via:

    cat ~/TEAMNAME_key.txt
   

   WARNING: Never commit these credentials into your repository, or put them anywhere else that they might be made public.

3. From the home directory, clone this repository:

    git clone https://github.com/scalableinternetservices/demo.git
   

4. Change into the project directory, and initialize elasticbeanstalk:

    cd demo
    eb init
   

5. Use the us-west-2 region (default).

6. Provide your aws-access-id. (if prompted)

7. Provide your aws-secret-key. (if prompted)

8. Create a new application (default) for your team if no such application already exists.

   • Use your team name as your application's name.

9. Indicate that you are using ruby.

10. For now, choose Ruby 2.5 (Puma) as your platform (default). You can experiment with passenger later.

11. Do not continue with CodeCommit (default).

12. Indicate that you do want to set up SSH for your instances (default).

    • Choose the keypair that matches your team's name.

13. To test this configuration, skip ahead to section "Creating Elastic Beanstalk Deployments", wherein you will deploy this demo project to Elastic Beanstalk.

Preparing Your Application for Elastic Beanstalk

Use similar steps as above to initialize eb for your own project's repository. Note that eb init must be run from the top most directory of your repository.

Next you need to make some changes to your application in order to configure it to work well with elasticbeanstalk.

1. Ignore most of the elastic beanstalk related files.

   • Make a similar change to .gitignore as added here: https://github.com/scalableinternetservices/demo/commit/9c027be29d125e5ad69bfc5adf7c91b4dff39be3#diff-a084b794bc0759e7a6b77810e01874f2

2. Update your Gemfile to use the pg gem in production, and sqlite3 in development.

   1. Make a similar change to Gemfile as added here (do not manually update Gemfile.lock): https://github.com/scalableinternetservices/demo/commit/9c027be29d125e5ad69bfc5adf7c91b4dff39be3#diff-8b7db4d5cc4b8f6dc8feb7030baa2478

   2. Run bundle install --without-production to update your Gemfile.lock.

3. Configure your production database settings to use postgresql and to fetch the right settings from the environment provided by elastic beanstalk.

   0. Make similar changes as added here: https://github.com/scalableinternetservices/demo/commit/9c027be29d125e5ad69bfc5adf7c91b4dff39be3#diff-e31bdf70b15c8f84344c332efe06900d

Creating Elastic Beanstalk Deployments

Once you have prepared either the demo application, or your application, you can make various deployments of said application.

Create a deployment for demo purposes

Use the following command when you are simply testing out changes, or demoing because this will create a deployment that operates with the cheapest cost.

eb create -db.engine postgres -db.i db.t2.micro -db.user u --envvars SECRET_KEY_BASE=RANDOM_SECRET --single DEPLOYMENT-NAME

Replace DEPLOYMENT-NAME with a unique name for your deployment. Consider teamname-yourname.

Replace RANDOM_SECRET with some semi-random large string of alphanumeric characters. Note, for real sites you want this to be really random as your cookies are signed/encrypted using a key derived from this string.

Create a deployment for load testing

When you are ready to run tsung tests, use a form of the following command to specify the database instance type, and application server instance type.

eb create -db.engine postgres -db.i DB_INSTANCE_TYPE -db.user u --envvars SECRET_KEY_BASE=RANDOM_SECRET -i INSTANCE_TYPE DEPLOYMENT_NAME

Replace DB_INSTANCE_TYPE with one of:

---

• ($0.178) db.m5.large 2 vCPU / 8 GiB
• ($0.356) db.m5.xlarge 4 vCPU / 16 GiB
• ($0.712) db.m5.2xlarge 8 vCPU / 32 GiB
• ($1.424) db.m5.4xlarge 16 vCPU / 64 GiB

---

• ($0.250) db.r4.large 2 vCPU / 15.25 GiB
• ($0.500) db.r4.xlarge 4 vCPU / 30.5 GiB
• ($1.000) db.r4.2xlarge 8 vCPU / 61 GiB
• ($2.000) db.r4.4xlarge 16 vCPU / 122 GiB

---

Replace INSTANCE_TYPE with one of:

---

• ($0.085) c5.large 2 vCPU / 4 GiB
• ($0.170) c5.xlarge 4 vCPU / 8 GiB
• ($0.340) c5.2xlarge 8 vCPU / 16 GiB
• ($0.680) c5.4xlarge 16 vCPU / 32 GiB
• ($1.530) c5.9xlarge 36 vCPU / 72 GiB

---

• ($0.096) m5.large 2 vCPU / 8 GiB
• ($0.192) m5.xlarge 4 vCPU / 16 GiB
• ($0.384) m5.2xlarge 8 vCPU / 32 GiB
• ($0.768) m5.4xlarge 16 vCPU / 64 GiB

---

See the following for differences between the instance types:

• https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

Modifying Running Deployments

Scale your deployment

To manage your deployments, log in to the AWS web console and go to the "configuration" tab:

https://console.aws.amazon.com/console/home

• Account ID or alias: bboe-ucsb
• IAM user name and Password: See the file TEAMNAME.txt in your team's home folder of the EC2 instance at ec2.cs291.com.

Vertically scale by changing the instance type [Ref].

Horizontally scale by adjusting the minimum and maximum number of instances [Ref].

Note: set the minimum and maximum instance count to the same value to keep the instance number fixed throughout the duration of your test. Verify all instances are available before running any tests.

Terminate a deployment

Run eb terminate to terminate the active deployment. Alternatively run eb terminate DEPLAYMENT_NAME to terminate a different deployment.

Update the rails application

To update the application source code perform the following tasks:

• Run git pull to update the copy of the repository.

• (Optional) Check out a branch if you intend to work with a branch. Ensure the local copy is up-to-date.

• Run eb list to see which deployment is currently active (it will have a * next to it).

• (If needed) Run eb use DEPLOYMENT_NAME to change the active deployment.

• Run eb deploy to update the active deployment.