Amazon AWS setup guide

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What is this document about?

This rough guide is about how to create, setup your own Amazon AWS cloud based codeBeamer server. Note that your requirements may vary from the hints and best practices you will find here...

Time to complete a deployment

The time to complete the deployment depends on the deployment type:

First installation with an empty database: 1-2 hours.
Migrating data to an already existing deployment: Depends on the size of the data from hours to days.

Getting started with Amazon cloud services

Amazon AWS is a cloud services platform which offers several services. In this guide we give you hints about how to:

Create your Amazon AWS server
Install and configure your own codeBeamer server on this
Maintain and manage your codeBeamer server there

So first we will create a virtual machine on Amazon EC2 and install codeBeamer there. This virtual machine will be dedicated to your codeBeamer server and will run safe in the Amazon cloud.

Registering with Amazon AWS services

First to get started you will need to create an Amazon AWS account: click here and register on Amazon AWS.

The registration itself is free, and you will just pay for the services you will use in the future. For some limited testing and learning Amazon AWS offers free services too, for example you can create a small virtual machine for free and run for a month. Note however that such small instances are not suitable for a codeBeamer installation.

Choosing your Amazon AWS instance type: planning capacity and costs

Amazon EC2 cloud offers variously sized virtual machines too choose from. You should plan how many users will use your codeBeamer server and how many data/disk is needed there in advance. See also our General System Requirements for planning.

Later you can switch to a larger virtual machine if necessary or resize/increase the used disk, but that will require some extra administration costs.

The list of Amazon Instance types is acessible on this link.Generally we recommend creating at virtual machine with the following parameters:

Use at least 3.75G memory as minimum, 7.5 or more is recommended
Use at least 2 vCPU, more is recommended depending on the number of concurrent users in your system
Choose SSD disks if possible

So as minimum we would recommend an m3.large virtual machine. Our codebeamer.com server is using an C3.2xlarge instance with 8 cpu and 15G of memory.

Amazon AWS security management

Amazon AWS security management is conform to ISO/IEC 27001.

Amazon AWS Available Regions

Please refer https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-availability-zones.html about available regions.

Estimating costs

Amazon AWS EC2 servers' costs will depend on the virtual machine's size (instance type) and also on disks. You can calculate and estimate this in advance using Amazon AWS cost calculator.

Starting an Amazon AWS server instance

After you have decided what kind of AWS instance you start with and registered for Amazon AWS: you can create and start up your EC2 instance. This guide of Amazon helps you how to do this.

You will also need to choose what operating system you will run on your Amazon EC2 instance. We generally recommend using an 64 bit Ubuntu linux instance. You can pick your OS on Amazon AWS marketplace, for example this search lists Ubuntu instances.

Setting up codeBeamer on Amazon AWS

When starting your new EC2 instance you will get just an empty linux/Ubuntu virtual matchine. You should get an ssh/console access that server using the key-pair you have used during the instance creation.

The next task is to set up the linux/Ubuntu instance and install codeBeamer and the required services there. We provide two step-by-step guide for this:

If you follow the instructions then your server should be up and running codeBeamer happily.

Configuring fix ip and DNS: using Amazon DNS

Once your Amazon codeBeamer instance is running happily you should assign an fix IP address to that and set up a DNS name for that bound IP so users will be able to access this easily. Typically this means:

Allocate an fix IP address called Elastic IP address on the Amazon AWS console, and assign this IP address to your instance, so it gets this fix IP
Register your domain name - if not yet registered-: you can use any provider, but we recommend using Amazon Route 53 for Domain name registration
Configure your DNS server and bind fix IP to your domain name. You can use any DNS server/provider, we recommend Amazon Route 53 DNS Service

Configuring LDAP/Active Directory

See LDAP/Active Directory configuration instructions.

Configuring Amazon AWS firewall & security

Once the codeBeamer instance is up and running the access to this server from public should be restricted. For this you should ]configure an custom Security Group|http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-network-security.html] for your instance, and allow only those ports through the firewall which are really necessary.

Also you should limit access to SSH server, for example for key-pair logins only there.

For example these are the typical ports enabled on our servers: [!securityGroup.png!]

Migrating your data to Amazon AWS

The easiest way to migrate your data to Amazon AWS is either:

Do a mysql backup/dump and import to Amazon AWS
Or export using codeBeamer's project export and import on Amazon AWS server. Note that project export/import has few known limitations!

Backup and Disaster Recovery on Amazon AWS

There are 2 disks that need to be backed up:

the EBS volume (media disk) attached to your EC2 instance
the RDS Database

Backing up the EBS

The easiest way is to create a Snapshot from the disk
This is a live snapshot, therefore codebeamer does not have to be stopped during the backup
The frequency is up to the user. Usually, it is done once a day
The backups are retained as long as they are not deleted

Backing up RDS

Create snapshot using AWS backup service
This is a live snapshot, thus no downtime is required
The backup frequency is up to the user. It is usually done once a day
The backups are retained as long as they are not deleted

Point in time recovery

This is also a live snapshot, downtime is not required
It is possible to restore to any seconds between the retention period and the last 5 minutes
Maximum of 35 days retention period

There are more options for backing up data that can be discovered, but the above options should provide users with a good disaster recovery ability.

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