AWS CloudFormation Templates

 

 

SoftNAS Cloud® supports Amazon Web Services CloudFormation templates, which leverage the CLI for fully automating storage deployment.  Deployment and setup automation is especially helpful for DevOps to create repeatable processes for QA testing, benchmarking, development environment creation and production rollouts.

 

The CloudFormation templates shipped with SoftNAS Cloud® are provided as working samples, to be modified and customized for each customers' particular needs and use cases. At a minimum, modify the templates to reference the SoftNAS Cloud® AMIs to be used; also modify the storage size, pool and volume names and other aspects to fit deployment needs. 

 

Note: These templates are fairly basic. More advanced users may want to involve making additional CLI calls to perform certain tasks; e.g., configuring replication between two SoftNAS Cloud® instances.

 

There are two templates to choose from:

 

1. SoftNAS-AWSCloudTemplate-Basic.json - for paravirtual machine (PVM) systems, use this template as a starting point.

 

2. Softnas-AWSCloudTemplateHVM.json - for hardware virtual machine (HVM) systems, start with this template.

 

 

Using AWS cloud formation templates, launch a SoftNAS Cloud® instance with the following features:

 

1. Two EBS volumes with 50 GB each

2. Allocate and assign EIP to the instance

3. Mount the EBS volume with storage pool in RAID0 (striping) configuration

4. Enable CIFS and NFS shares

 

To begin, download the template using one of the links above.  Modify the template to include the SoftNAS Cloud® AMI ID along with any other preferred customizations.

 

To deploy the template, in the AWS console choose Services, then Deployment & Management as shown below.  Then choose CloudFormation.

 

 

Select Create Stack and then Create New Stack.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enter the Stack name and Template File. Then select upload or provide an s3 path to the template file.

 

 

In the Parameters screen, enter the type of the instance (t1.micro, m3.medium, etc.) and the available SSH key name.

 

Note: Instance launch will fail if an SSH key is not assigned. If a key is not available, create one and then proceed from here.

 

 

Optionally, tag the instance name and skip the advanced settings. Instance is already tagged in the template with the name Softnas-CF. Click Next Step to proceed to the final screen.

 

Review the details and click Create to launch the instance. It may take up to 5 minutes to fully deploy and start the SoftNAS Cloud® instance using the CloudFormation template.

 

For more information on CloudFormation templates and customization, please refer to the Command Line Interface (CLI) Reference and AWS CloudFormation Documentation.