Note: You only need one of the three setup methods!

Setup, Method 3 – Deploying in AWS

Deploying in Amazon can be one of the fastest ways to get up and running with Gluster. Of course, most of what we cover here will work with other cloud platforms.

  • Deploy at least two instances. For testing, you can use micro instances (I even go as far as using spot instances in most cases). Debates rage on what size instance to use in production, and there is really no correct answer. As with most things, the real answer is “whatever works for you”, where the trade-offs between cost and performance are balanced in a continual dance of trying to make your project successful while making sure there is enough money left over in the budget for you to get that sweet new ping pong table in the break room.
  • For cloud platforms, your data is wide open right from the start. As such, you shouldn’t allow open access to all ports in your security groups if you plan to put a single piece of even the least valuable information on the test instances. By least valuable, I mean “Cash value of this coupon is 1/100th of 1 cent” kind of least valuable. Don’t be the next one to end up as a breaking news flash on the latest inconsiderate company to allow their data to fall into the hands of the baddies. See Step 2 for the minimum ports you will need open to use Gluster
  • You can use the free “ephemeral” storage for the Gluster bricks during testing, but make sure to use some form of protection against data loss when you move to production. Typically this means EBS backed volumes or using S3 to periodically back up your data bricks.

Other notes:

  • In production, it is recommended to replicate your VM’s across multiple zones. For purpose of this tutorial, it is overkill, but if anyone is interested in this please let us know since we are always looking to write articles on the most requested features and questions.
  • Using EBS volumes and Elastic IP’s is also recommended in production. For testing, you can safely ignore these as long as you are aware that the data could be lost at any moment, so make sure your test deployment is just that, testing only.
  • Performance can fluctuate wildly in a cloud environment. If performance issues are seen, there are several possible strategies, but keep in mind that this is the perfect place to take advantage of the scale-out capability of Gluster. While it is not true in all cases that deploying more instances will necessarily result in a “faster” cluster, in general, you will see that adding more nodes means more performance for the cluster overall.
  • If a node reboots, you will typically need to do some extra work to get Gluster running again using the default EC2 configuration. If a node is shut down, it can mean absolute loss of the node (depending on how you set things up). This is well beyond the scope of this document, but is discussed in any number of AWS related forums and posts. Since I found out the hard way myself (oh, so you read the manual every time?!), I thought it worth at least mentioning.

Once you have both instances up, you can proceed to the install page.