This repo hosts templates written for the AWS Blog Post "Accelerate Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling for Microsoft Windows workloads" published on the Microsoft Workloads on AWS blog channel.
This deploys infrastructure to run Bob's Used Books, an e-commerce website built with .NET. This sample solution leverages Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups to launch additional instances seamlessly during traffic spikes. This maintains application performance even under heavy load. This solution also uses EC2 fast launch technologies to streamline the instance boot process. Rather than taking 15+ minutes for a typical Windows Server OS launch with multiple reboots, fast launch skips unnecessary steps to boot freshly launched instances.
To deploy the application to AWS you need the following:
- An active AWS account
- 2 Public subnets in two different Availability Zones
- 2 Private subnets in two different Availability Zones
- A EC2 Key pair
- Download deployment template. For this example we'll use the WindowsAutoScaling.yml CloudFormation template.
- Create a stack from the AWS CloudFormation Console. The CloudFormation template will create the resources shown in the architectural diagram above.
The stack template includes the following parameters:
| Parameter | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Stack name | Yes | A stack is a collection of AWS resources that you can manage as a single unit. In other words, you can create, update, or delete a collection of resources by creating, updating, or deleting stacks. All the resources in a stack are defined by the stack's AWS CloudFormation template. |
| VPC | Yes | A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a virtual network dedicated to your AWS account. It is logically isolated from other virtual networks in the AWS Cloud. |
| PublicSubnets | Yes | A public subnet is a subnet that is associated with a route table that has a route to an Internet gateway. This connects the VPC to the Internet and to other AWS services. You much provide at least two for the internet-facing load balancer. |
| PrivateSubnets | Yes | A private subnet is a subnet that is associated with a route table that doesn't have a route to an internet gateway. You much provide at least two for the Auto Scaling group, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Managed Active Directory (MAD) and other resources. |
| InstanceType | Yes | Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types optimized to fit different use cases. Instance types comprise varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications. Each instance type includes one or more instance sizes, allowing you to scale your resources to the requirements of your target workload. |
| KeyPair | Yes | A key pair, consisting of a public key and a private key, is a set of security credentials that you use to prove your identity when connecting to an Amazon EC2 instance. |
| MicrosoftADDomainName | Yes | Fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the AWS Managed Microsoft AD domain e.g. corp.example.com |
After the infrastructure has been deployed into your environment, you can test the application by changing the desired capacity for the Auto Scaling group size.
- To make this change in the AWS Console, navigate to the EC2 Service and click Auto Scaling Groups for the left navigation.
- In the right pane, you'll see an auto scaling group prefixed by the stack name you chose earlier.
- Select this group.
- Click Edit.
- Change the Desired, Minimum, Maximum to 2 and Update.
- After a few minutes the EC2 will be provisioned. To view the website we need to get the DNS of the load balancer. Click Load Balancers from EC2 Service left navigation.
- In the right pane, you'll see a load balancers prefixed by the stack name you chose earlier.
- Select this load balancer.
- Copy the DNS name and paste in your browser address bar to view the application.
See CONTRIBUTING for more information.
This library is licensed under the MIT-0 License. See the LICENSE file.