Regarding Cloudformation Install on AWS

1

Hi there,

I am new to Aerospike and over the last few days I have been going through the documentation which has been very helpful, thanks to everyone maintaining it. I tried setting up a cluster using the Cloudformation template. I had some questions regarding the same:

  • It seems the CF template also has auto-scaling configured. I wanted to know when does it get triggered? Like which metrics does it depend on? Is there any way I can trigger the auto-scaling mechanism using the benchmark utility?

  • Is there any way I can tweak the cloudformation template so that my application which is connecting to the Aerospike clsuter does not have to adjust the IP addresses of the Aerospike hosts when new nodes are added or existing nodes are removed?

  • For logging into the AMC console, it prompted for username and password. I SSHed to one of the instances and found the same in the /etc/amc/amc.conf file. I hope this is different for every install? Is there any way I can tweak the Cloudformation template to setup my own credentials?

Thanks in advance

Mandeep

2

Glad you’re finding the template useful. To answer your questions,

  • The CFT defines an auto scaling group, but does not define scaling triggers. For aerospike, the scaling factor is typically the disk utilization. Because of this, we cannot define a threshold that works across all instance types.

  • The Aerospike smart client design means that as long as you have a fraction of your original nodes in your current cluster, you will discover all current nodes of the cluster. You don’t have to do anything yourself, beyond providing one or more “seed” nodes to the client. As long as the “seed” node(s) are still part of the cluster, new and existing clients will be able to discover the entire cluster.
    Otherwise, you can hook into route53, and register each node under the same DNS address (DNS Round Robin), and use the DNS address as the host for your clients.

  • The template deploys our public marketplace image as its base. As such, amc.conf is pre-generated with the password being the VM’s ID. If you’d like to specify your own amc password, you’d need to create your own base ami image.

Hope this helps.