Provision a Deis Cluster on Amazon EC2

Install the AWS Command Line Interface:

$ pip install awscli
Downloading/unpacking awscli
  Downloading awscli-1.5.0.tar.gz (248kB): 248kB downloaded
...
Successfully installed awscli

Configure aws-cli

Run aws configure to set your AWS credentials:

$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: ***************
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: ************************
Default region name [None]: us-west-1
Default output format [None]:

Upload keys

Generate and upload a new keypair to AWS, ensuring that the name of the keypair is set to "deis".

$ ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/deis -N '' -C deis
$ aws ec2 import-key-pair --key-name deis --public-key-material file://~/.ssh/deis.pub

Choose number of instances

By default, the script will provision 3 servers. You can override this by setting DEIS_NUM_INSTANCES:

$ export DEIS_NUM_INSTANCES=5

Note that for scheduling to work properly, clusters must consist of at least 3 nodes and always have an odd number of members. For more information, see optimal etcd cluster size.

Deis clusters of less than 3 nodes are unsupported.

Customize user-data

Create a user-data file with a new discovery URL this way:

$ make discovery-url

Or copy contrib/coreos/user-data.example to contrib/coreos/user-data and follow the directions in the etcd: section to add a unique discovery URL.

Customize cloudformation.json

Any of the parameter defaults defined in deis.template.json can be overridden by setting the value in cloudformation.json like so:

    {
        "ParameterKey":     "InstanceType",
        "ParameterValue":   "m3.xlarge"
    },
    {
        "ParameterKey":     "KeyPair",
        "ParameterValue":   "jsmith"
    },
    {
        "ParameterKey":     "EC2VirtualizationType",
        "ParameterValue":   "PV"
    },
    {
        "ParameterKey":     "AssociatePublicIP",
        "ParameterValue":   "false"
    }

The only entry in cloudformation.json required to launch your cluster is KeyPair, which is already filled out. The defaults will be applied for the other settings.

If updated with update-ec2-cluster.sh, the InstanceType will only impact newly deployed instances (#1758).

NOTE: The smallest recommended instance size is large. Having not enough CPU or RAM will result in numerous issues when using the cluster.

Launch into an existing VPC

By default, the provided CloudFormation script will create a new VPC for Deis. However, the script supports provisioning into an existing VPC instead. You'll need to have a VPC configured with an internet gateway and a sane routing table (the default VPC in a region should be ready to go).

To launch your cluster into an existing VPC, export three additional environment variables: VPC_ID, VPC_SUBNETS, VPC_ZONES. VPC_ZONES must list the availability zones of the subnets in order.

For example, if your VPC has ID vpc-a26218bf and consists of the subnets subnet-04d7f942 (which is in us-east-1b) and subnet-2b03ab7f (which is in us-east-1c) you would export:

export VPC_ID=vpc-a26218bf
export VPC_SUBNETS=subnet-04d7f942,subnet-2b03ab7f
export VPC_ZONES=us-east-1b,us-east-1c

Run the provision script

Run the cloudformation provision script to spawn a new CoreOS cluster:

$ cd contrib/ec2
$ ./provision-ec2-cluster.sh
{
    "StackId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-west-1:413516094235:stack/deis/9699ec20-c257-11e3-99eb-50fa01cd4496"
}
Your Deis cluster has successfully deployed.
Please wait for all instances to come up as "running" before continuing.

Check the AWS EC2 web control panel and wait until "Status Checks" for all instances have passed. This will take several minutes.

Configure Deis

Set the default domain used to anchor your applications:

$ deisctl config platform set domain=mycluster.local

For this to work, you'll need to configure DNS records so you can access applications hosted on Deis. See Configuring DNS for details.

If you want to allow deis run for one-off admin commands, you must provide an SSH private key that allows Deis to gather container logs on CoreOS hosts:

$ deisctl config platform set sshPrivateKey=<path-to-private-key>

Initialize the cluster

Once the cluster is up, get the hostname of any of the machines from EC2, set DEISCTL_TUNNEL, and issue a deisctl install:

$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/deis
$ export DEISCTL_TUNNEL=ec2-12-345-678-90.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
$ deisctl install platform && deisctl start platform

Deisctl will deploy Deis and make sure the services start properly.

Configure load balancer

The Deis provisioning scripts for EC2 automatically create an Elastic Load Balancer for your Deis cluster. However, ELBs on EC2 have a default timeout of 60 seconds, which will disrupt a git push when using Deis. You should manually increase this timeout to 1200 seconds to match the timeout on the router and application unit files.

Configure DNS

While you can reference the controller and hosted applications with public hostnames provided by EC2, it is recommended for ease-of-use that you configure your own DNS records using a domain you own. See Configuring DNS for details.

Use Deis!

After that, register with Deis!

$ deis register http://deis.example.org
username: deis
password:
password (confirm):
email: info@opdemand.com

Hack on Deis

See Hacking on Deis.