What is the best practice for a persistent LAMP on AWS?

0
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Let me preface this by saying that I am primarily a programmer, though I have a pretty good working knowledge of Linux and "standard" LAMP installations. I have been tasked with setting up a persistent LAMP environment in Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a good deal more involved than what I'm used to in this regard.

Although AWS is very well documented, I have yet to find a clear, definitive "Best Practices" overview for setting up a persistent LAMP environment. I followed the official Amazon tutorial ( http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/install-LAMP.html ) to set up a LAMP server on our EC2 instance, but found out later that these instances are "temporary" and that I need an EBS to make anything persist. Interestingly, EBS (Elastic Block Storage) does not appear in my Management Console , though they offer pricing out on the public side ( https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ ). Is it still called EBS?

Of course, that begs the question - what happens to the programs I installed (Apache, MySQL) along with their respective config files? Surely Amazon doesn't expect us to reconfigure our server from scratch every time it boots up?

What I have now

  • 1x EC2 instance running Amazon Linux. I installed and configured Apache and MySQL following the "Install LAMP" tutorial posted by Amazon.
  • 1x Route 53 Hosted Zones (for DNS routing)
  • 1x Elastic IP attached to the EC2 server

Additionally, there appears to be one unencrypted 8GB volume attached to /dev/xvda, although I didn't set it up and nobody has access but myself - it seems to have been generated when I requisitioned the EC2 - no idea if it is persistent or not.

What I think I need

So, here is what I'm thinking I need to do. Please tell me if I'm way off - is there a more sane alternative?

  • 1x EC2 instance running Amazon Linux and Apache
  • 1x RDS for MySQL
  • 1x Route 53 Hosted Zone
  • 1x Elastic IP attached to the EC2 server
  • 1x (EBS? S3? EFS?) for storing htdocs
  • 1x Snapshot of the EC2 to save server configuration

Does that sound right? Is there a better way to do this? Thanks so much for any advice. Amazon docs seem to be very good at giving granular information, but not as great at addressing overall strategy concerns.

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amazon-web-servicesamazon-s3amazon-ec2

1 Answers

2
votes

  1. Web Application

    It is recommended to have 2 EC2 instances under an Elastic Load Balancer with these 2 instances being in separate availability zones for high availability. Going further is better to monitor these instances for CPU and bandwidth - CloudWatch - and once you see they are above some threshold you could automatically add more instances to the ELB, this is the auto scaling. Of course like you said you will need the AMI (snapshot) with the server software to be ready to be launched. You also need to take down servers when the load is small - again automatically with the metrics, but you should never go down under 2 machines. And don't forget to update these images when you upgrade the software.

  2. Route 53

    Because you would use an ELB you don't need Elastic IPs anymore, your web servers could only have private IPs. And on the Route 53 you need to point your website to the name of the ELB - here are more details about it

  3. Database

    For the database part go for the RDS for MySQL including Multi-AZ deployment, so you will have the master and one stand by replica in different availability zones.

  4. EBS (disks)

    For the EBS part you will ned to use that and they come in 3 flavours: magnetic(slowest), General Purpose SSD (faster) and Provisioned IOPS (fastest). These are the disks you mount on your machines, web servers and databases. For the database you should go with Provisioned, it is much harder to change them later, while for the web server we use General Purpose. In the AWS Console you find them under EC2, section Elastic Block Store.

The 8G disk that appeared is the default when you create a Linux machine and it is a General Purpose SSD which is good enough for a web server, but I think you should go with a bigger one, 50G at least.