Terraform Config

[evankirkiles]

Just wanted to share a Terraform configuration for setting up JATOS automatically on AWS, if people would rather manage their own cloud resources than passing that responsibility off to something like DigitalOcean: https://github.com/evankirkiles/jatos-terraform. The instructions will be up soon, but if you're comfortable with Terraform you should have an idea of what to do.

It's mostly just coordinating persistence and security across the EBS volumes, the RDS database, and the EC2 instance, but a nice bonus feature is that this code also configures a LetsEncrypt certificate and SSL on the nginx instance if you set the necessary ssl_ variables in Terraform.

I also wanted to ask about estimated memory footprint for the study_assets/ folder, result_uploads/ folder, and JATOS service instance itself––I feel like I'm going overboard with allocating 10GB, 10GB, and 8GB respectively. Can I be more conservative in any of these areas?

[kristian-lange]

Sounds great :)
But unfortunately I can't open the repo. Is it maybe private?

I also wanted to ask about estimated memory footprint for the study_assets/ folder, result_uploads/ folder, and JATOS service instance itself––I feel like I'm going overboard with allocating 10GB, 10GB, and 8GB respectively. Can I be more conservative in any of these areas?

You mean disk space?

• For the JATOS service itself 8GB should be enough. But I would give it some more space because JATOS likes to put files in the /tmp folder and then forgets about them (actually they get deleted with the next restart of the host but usually a server doesn't get rebooted often) - or add a cronjob that cleans the tmp folder regularly (e.g. https://askubuntu.com/questions/380238/how-to-clean-tmp)
• study_assets/ - This completely depends on the usage of your JATOS. If your users import a lot of studies with large media files you need a lot of space. I once heard about a study with with over 1GB of high-quality sound files (just to give an example). But to give an example: the study_assets_root folder on jatos.mindprobe.eu with currently over 3100 studies takes 34GB.
• result_uploads/ - The same: it completely depends on the usage of your JATOS. This is the folder where result files can be uploaded by study runs. This is usually not used often (since most result data go in the database), but when it's used files tend to get large. But to give an example: the study_assets_root folder on jatos.mindprobe.eu takes currently 14GB.

Or you mean memory? Then JATOS can run on 2-4GB for a normal installation and needs 8GB for a bigger.

[evankirkiles]

Oh oops, I just made it public––you should be able to view it now.