This may seem an obvious for people who have worked with AWS but I have a lot of trouble figuring out on how to set up a loadbalancer on 2 EC2 instances which are hosting multiple websites.
We have 2 Windows 2012 R2 machines set up, I have created one ELB and from what I have read, I know you can point that ELB to one location (assuming its the default site on the servers). How would I go about pointing say other ELBs that I create to point to the other applications on the server? (Not sure if this info is relevant but just to add : This whole setup is a part of VPC, Domain Controller environment and the web servers are in public subnet. )
One way to solve this is by running your applications in multiple IIS websites.
Each of the websites should have a different site binding with a different host name. You could use the DNS name of the load balancer for each website.
Alternatively you can use a domain name configured in Route53 and use an A record to point to the load balancer.
Related
We are developing applications and devices that communicate with our servers. We have one "main" Java Spring server which handles almost all the HTTP requests including user authentication, storing relevant user data and giving that data to the applications. Furthermore, we have a few smaller HTTP servers (written in golang) which are both used by the "main" server to perform certain tasks but also have some public API's that apps and devices use directly.
In our current non-production setup we run all the servers locally on one machine with an apache2 in front which directs the requests. So the servers can be accessed via the apache2 by a user by their respective subdomains but they also perform some communication between each other. When doing so, currently we simply send the request to localhost:{PORT} since they all run on the same machine. They furthermore all utilize the same mysql-server running on that same machine.
We are now looking to get it more production-ready and are looking to deploy it to AWS. They are currently not containerized so a solution that requires containerization (ECS? K8s?) would most likely require more work. What would be the most straightforward way to do the following:
Deploy a number of servers on AWS where they are exposed publicly with their respective domains but can also communicate internally with one another (or would they just communicate with one another using their public domains?)
Deploy a managed SQL database (Amazon RDS?) which is accessible for all the servers.
Setup the routing of the requests. Currently run our own configured apache2 but I assume we can add a managed API Gateway in AWS and configure it for our servers.
Q. Deploy a number of servers on AWS where they are exposed publicly
with their respective domains but can also communicate internally with
one another (or would they just communicate with one another using
their public domains?)
On AWS you create a VPC(1st default VPC is created when you login for the first time).
You can deploy a number of EC2 instances(virtual servers) with just private IP addresses and without any public access and put them behind an ELB(elastic load balancer). The ELB will take all the traffic and distribute the load onto the servers based on endpoint.
However the EC2 instances won't have public IPs A VPC(virtual Private Gateway) allows your services to communicate to each other via private IPs (something like 172.31.xx.xx), You can also provide domain/sub-domain names to these private IP addresses using Route53 service of AWS.
For example You launch 2 servers:
Your Java Application - on 172.31.1.1 (you name it
xyz.myjavaapp.something.com on Route53)
Your Angular Application - on 172.31.1.2
The angular application can reach your java application on 172.31.1.1:8080 or
xyz.myjavaapp.something.com:8080
Q. Deploy a managed SQL database (Amazon RDS?) which is accessible for
all the servers.
Yes you can deploy an SQL database on RDS and it will be available to the EC2 instances. Just make sure you create proper security groups to allow only your servers to access it, and not leave it open for public internet.
Example for a VPC only security group entry is 172.31.0.0/16 This will allow only ther servers in you VPC to connect to the RDS DB. given that your VPC subnet has the range 172.31.x.x
Q. Setup the routing of the requests. Currently run our own configured
apache2 but I assume we can add a managed API Gateway in AWS and
configure it for our servers.
You can set up public/private APIs and manage different endpoints using API Gateway.
Another way it to put your application server behind an Application ELB. The ELB can take care of load balancing as well as endpoint management.
for example :
if you decide to deploy 2 servers for /getData and 1 server for /doSomethingElse. It can be easily managed by ELB.
I would suggest you use at-least servers for critical services and load balance them behind and ELB for production env.
On another note, containerizing and deploying to kubernetes is not that difficult or time consuming. But yes it has got some learning curve, but the benefits outweigh it.
Feel free to ask questions.
I am setting up a Rancher environment.
The Rancher server is behind a classic ELB (since ALBs are not recommended per Rancher guidelines).
I also want to make available Prometheus and Grafana services.
These are offered via Rancher catalogue and will run as container services, being exposed on Rancher host ports 3000 and 9090.
Since Rancher server (per their recommendations) requires ELB, I wanted to explore the options on how to make available the two services above using the most minimal possible setup.
If the server is available on say rancher.mydomain.com, ideally I would like to have the other two on grafana.mydomain.com and prometheus.mydomain.com.
Can I at least combine the later two behind an ALB?
If so, how do I map them?
Do I place <my_rancher_host_public_IP>:3000 and <my_rancher_host_public_IP>:9090 behind an ALB?
You could do this a couple (maybe more) ways:
use an external dns updater like the route 53 infra catalog item. That will automatically map dns directly to the public ip of the host that houses the services. Modify the dns template so it prepends the service name to the domain.
register your targets and map the ports, then set a dns entry to the ALB.
The first way will allow for dns to update in case the service shifts across hosts in your environment. You could leverage the second way and force containers to specific hosts.
I'm trying to setup multiple different websites on a single cluster of servers (DC/OS). These servers are load balanced via ELB and the websites are spread out across the servers (each website has it's own port that stays the same on all the servers). What I want to do is something like:
example.com -> [elb public dns]:8080
example2.com -> [elb public dns]: 9000
I found a way to do this via multiple application ELBs. I can essentially listen on port 80 on multiple different ELBs, each ELB for a specific website. These ELBs are then directed to the proper "target group". However, I'm not sure if this is a good solution since I need to pay for multiple ELBs just for routing my requests from DNS -> IP:PORT. Is there a better way to do this on AWS?
Yes, in DC/OS there is Marathon-LB (MLB) available as a Universe package. MLB is a HAProxy-based load balancer that can be configured exactly in the way you need it, see the section 'Virtual hosts' in the Marathon-LB docs.
I have a single Windows Amazon EC2 instance and one public IP. The instance is running multiple web server EXEs which all sit on port 80. I want to have different domain names which I want to point to each server. On my old dedicated server I achieved this simply by having different public IPs, but with Amazon EC2 I want to keep to just one public IP.
I am not using IIS, Apache, etc. otherwise life would be a lot simpler (I would simply bind hostnames accordingly). The web server executables perform unusual "utility" tasks as part of a range of other websites, but still need to be hosted on port 80. There is no configuration other than address to bind to and port #.
I have setup several private IPs and bound each server application to those private IPs. Is it possible to leverage some of the Amazon networking products to direct the traffic to the correct private IP? e.g. I have tried setting up a private-DNS using Amazon Route53, and internally at least this seems to point to the correct servers - but not (perhaps logically) when I try to access the site externally.
In absence of any other solutions I decided to solve this using the blunt hammer approach and use a reverse proxy. Downside is my servers now only see the user IPs as 127.0.0.1 which was less than ideal, but better than nothing at all.
For my reverse proxy I used Redbird (uses node.js) but Nginx may also be an option. Both are free / open source.
I am currently using Nginx server for my load balancer. But in order to use the Amazon's Load balancing feature I want to move to Amazon ELB. But the problem is my application has different routes or locations (same domain name with different sub-urls) that are handled by different ec2 instances. Like for example. (abc.com/ is handled by a set of ec2 instances while abc.com/xyz/* is handled by another set of instances). For now I use nginx to specify different upstream lists and and locations they handle. I tried to look at that in Amazon ELB but I didn't find it. So is it possible to do that in Amazon ELB or is there any way around that?
Sorry - other than supporting sticky sessions, there is no request-based routing logic in ELB.