AppZ Installer at AWS Marketplace

Welcome to AppZ Platform from Cloud Control. AppZ enables developers to start using Cloud and Kubernetes platform within hours, without learning any technologies or worrying about the underlying complexity. Goal of AppZ is to make developers focus on their code base while AppZ handles the build, deployment and day 2 monitoring of the applications.

In this section we will describe how to build the AppZ platform on AWS Cloud using AWS Marketplace and it only takes less than an hour to complete the build. Here we will be going over Easy Install Cloud Formation Template. Execute this Cloud Formation Template with an Administrator Privilege within the AWS Account. You can execute the CF template under root account, but it is recommended to execute as a separate user with Administrator privilege. Once the AppZ platform is built, it is available for users to deploy applications using GitOps in AppZ platform kubernetes cluster and no IAM role is necessary for this. The Admin user can connect to EC2 instance by using EC2 Instance Connect method and the application users do not need access to AWS infrastucture.

Easy Install

Easy Install is the simplest way to install the AppZ Platform in any AWS Account as it uses default VPC and does not have any prerequisites. It uses lowtouch.cloud to set up AppZ Dashboard url and uses LetsEncrypt for SSL Certificate. On the Cloud Formation screen enter the values as below:

  • Stack name(required)- Can be alphanumeric and allows dashes in between with maximum of 20 characters.
  • InstanceTypeParameter(required)- Select the EC2 Instance Type from the dropdown, default is t3a.xlarge.
  • SshCIDR(required)- Use your network to access EC2 instances, Default value is 0.0.0.0/0.
  • EmailAddress(optional)- If provided, use it during AppZ Dashboard Activation. If skipped, use noreply@lowtouch.cloud to Activate the AppZ Dashboard. You can find the Activation link in the Output section of CloudFormation.

Once the Cloud Formation stack is created successfully, in the Output section of CloudFormation screen you will get the ActivationEmail, ActivationLink, WebhookURL and kubernetes Master ip. By using the ActivationLink you can activate the Dashboard with the ActivationEmail provided in the cloudformation output section.

AppZ can be deployed in All Regions except in Asia Pacific(Jakarta), Asia Pacific(Hong Kong), GovCloud, China. AppZ platform creates two Security groups (MasterSecurityGroup,InstanceSecurityGroup), Elastic IP address, IAM instance profile and IAM role for Master instance. It also creates the CloudWatch LogGroup to view the AppZ cluster deploy logs . AppZ Platform from AWS Marketplace will create 3 EC2 instances with 3 EBS volumes of root-50, docker-100, data-250 which can be viewed via the EC2 dashboard. The user should create snapshots for all 3 EBS volumes and encrypt those volumes.

AppZ deployment logs are pushed to Cloud Watch for troubleshooting and healthcheck. Infrastructure health will be visible from AWS EC2 Dashboard and monitor the instances using CloudWatch. AppZ Platform Dashboard and CloudWatch will provde all diagnostic information for handling fault conditions.

While restoring data from EBS snapshot backup, only the data and docker volumes need to be restored as per Restoring from a snapshot

In case of any instance failures you can recover instance following below instructions:

  • Find the instance which has issues and confirm it is in stopped state. Create snapshots for 100, 150GB volumes of the failed instance.
  • Once the snapshots are ready, go to the instance, under Actions click Launch More Like This
  • Continue with default configuration and in the storage tab assign the above created two snapshot IDS (100, 150GB volumes respectively) and Launch the instance.
  • Once the instance is ready, Cloud Control team will help you in setting up the Volume mounts.

AppZ Platform from AWS Marketplace will create 3 EC2 instances master, one worker node will be in AZ1 another worker node will be in AZ2 with 3 EBS volumes of root-50, docker-100, data-250 which can be viewed via the EC2 dashboard and no service limit is enforced by AppZ platform. The user should create snapshots for all 3 EBS volumes and encrypt those volumes. In case of new worker node to be added in the AppZ cluster that will be created in AZ3.

For Disaster Recovery, the goal is to take a backup of the EC2 instances and make sure the backup is available in different region so in case of any issues we can recover from the backup. The backup needs to happen for all the instances that are running in AppZ cluster. In this case we have one master and two worker instances and each of the three instances should be individually restored. This can be achieved by following the steps in the link. Per instructions in the link, take the snapshot of root, docker and data volumes from original instance and create a new EC2 instance with these snapshots in different regions. When there is a DR situation, use this backup instances to recover the data and docker volumes for each of the instances. The recovery will take around 4 hours.

By default AppZ does not enable encryption. This is user driven. If the user enables the encryption in their account, depending upon the encryption mechanism selected, they will follow the AWS best practices to rotate the keys.

AppZ Software updates and patches are automatic. For any questions please reach out to support@ecloudcontrol.com

Most of the recovery for AppZ platform is self-serviced and automated. For any questions please reach out to support@ecloudcontrol.com