This is a tutorial on how to deploy an autoscaling Elasticache cluster on Ubuntu in AWS using CloudFormation.

The CloudFormation template and explanation is also posted on the NETBEARS company blog. You might want to check the website out for more tutorials like this.

git clone https://github.com/NETBEARS/elasticsearch-cluster-ubuntu.git

aws cloudformation create-stack \
  --stack-name elasticsearch-cluster-ubuntu \
  --template-body file://cloudformation-template.yaml \
  --parameters \
    ParameterKey=Ami,ParameterValue=ami-6e1a0117 \
    ParameterKey=AsgMaxSize,ParameterValue=8 \
    ParameterKey=AsgMinSize,ParameterValue=2 \
    ParameterKey=EmailAlerts,[email protected] \
    ParameterKey=InstanceType,ParameterValue=m4.large \
    ParameterKey=KeyName,ParameterValue=YOUR_INSTANCE_KEY \
    ParameterKey=VpcId,ParameterValue=VPC_ID \
    ParameterKey=SubnetID1,ParameterValue=SUBNET_IN_VPC_ID_1 \
    ParameterKey=SubnetID2,ParameterValue=SUBNET_IN_VPC_ID_2 \
  --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM

• Login to the AWS console and browse to the CloudFormation section
• Select the "cloudformation-template.yaml” file
• Before clicking "Create", make sure that you scroll down and tick the “I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources” checkbox
• ...drink coffee...
• Go to the URL in the output section for the environment that you want to access

• 1 AutoScaling Group
• 1 Elastic Load Balancer
• 1 S3 bucket (for data backup)
• 1 SNS topic (send monitoring alerts)

The autoscaling groups uses the CpuUtilization alarm to autoscale automatically.

Because of this, you wouldn't have to bother making sure that your hosts can sustain the load.

In order to be sure that you have set up the proper limits for your containers, the following alerts have been but into place:

• NetworkInAlarm
• RAMAlarmHigh
• NetworkOutAlarm
• IOWaitAlarmHigh
• StatusAlarm

These CloudWatch alarms will send an email each time the limits are hit so that you will always be in control of what happens with your stack.

The stack launches NodeExporter <> Prometheus exporter for hardware and OS metrics exposed by *NIX kernels, written in Go with pluggable metric collectors, on each host inside the cluster.

To view the monitoring data, all you need to setup is a Prometheus host and a Grafana dashboard and you're all set.

Due to the mechanics behind ElasticSearch, you don't need to set up any sort of data persistency, as the application itself ensures that all data is being replicated continuously throughout all existing and later-on created hosts.

Although the data persistency is covered, we should still have a backup for the data, just to be sure. Because of this, a cronjob has been set up to run every 3 days on the ASG hosts that dump the data in an S3 bucket that is created inside the template.

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