Getting Ready

Throughout this procedure, you will be using the AWS Management Console, and in particular the EC2 Dashboard and the Cloud Formation Dashboard. You may want to familiarize yourself with the console and bookmark it: https://console.aws.amazon.com

This procedure can be used to create an evaluation/development or a production eagle-i node:

  • An EVALUATION/DEVELOPMENT NODE requires less configuration, but it should not be used for collecting actual data; this type of node can be created and destroyed at will.
  • A PRODUCTION NODE will likely need some (limited) involvement of your IT department, but will result in a node that is ready for real world data collection. 

Note that an evaluation or development node cannot be converted to a production node. 

As a pre-prerequisite, you will need to decide which type of installation you will need, evaluation/development or production eagle-i node.

Prerequisites

You may need to involve your IT department to obtain the first 2 prerequisites for a PRODUCTION NODE.

  1. Public host name

    1. EVALUATION/DEVELOPMENT NODEmay use the amazon-generated public hostname
    2. PRODUCTION NODE will need to have a DNS record once you obtain an IP address from EC2
      • Decide on a good host name. It will determine the namespace of your Linked Open Data, and it shouldn't be changed once data exists in production.
      • Examples of existing host names: harvard.eagle-i.net, eagle-i.ea.vanderbilt.edu
  2. An SSL Certificate
    1. EVALUATION/DEVELOPMENT NODE may use the self-signed certificate provided by the AMI
    2. PRODUCTION NODE needs an X509 certificate in PEM format
  3. A browser (in our experience Firefox works best; in Chrome, the scrollbars in AWS dialogues are finicky)
  4. An Amazon Web Services (AWS) account with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service enabled
    1. Sign up for AWS
    2. Sign up for the EC2 service; this will require that you provide credit card information.
  5. An SSH client for remotely logging in to the EC2 instance
    • If you're using Linux, you know what this is about already
    • In MacOSX you can simply use the Terminal application that is installed by default (look in your Applications folder, under Utilities)
    • In Windows we recommend downloading and installing PuTTY (a remote login client that can handle SSH keys) or cygwin (a full Unix toolset)
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