Installation Preparation and Prerequisites

The following are the prerequisites for deploying a Lightbits storage cluster. Note that the last two are only required if you are deploying the cluster using AWS CLI.

General

• An AWS account from which the stack is initiated. The account must have permissions to create resources, such as i3en instances, a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), an ASG (Auto-Scaling-Group), NLB (Network Load Balancer), SecurityGroups, Create IAM roles and Lambda function execution. Consult with your AWS administrator if you need additional information.
• Provide a new S3 bucket for all of the required stack configuration (S3ConfBucketName). The Lightbits CF deployment stack will auto-generate a deployment folder with the resulting configuration in the provided bucket. The Role running the stack should have R/W permissions to the provided S3 bucket. Failing to provide a bucket with the correct permissions will cause the deployment to fail.
• If you are planning to deploy via CLI, the AWS CLI should be installed on the machine (sudo apt -y install awscli or sudo yum -y install awscli, depending on your Linux distribution). See the AWS installation instructions in this guide for additional information.
• Account permissions must be set for the AWS CLI (aws configure).
• If you are deploying the Lightbits cluster on an existing VPC see the next section for additional requirements.

Deploying on an Existing VPC

Lightbits clusters can be deployed in a new VPC that the Cloud Formation template will create. You can also deploy the cluster in your existing VPC.

In order for our cluster to work properly, there are requirements that you have to pre-configure on the VPC that you want to use:

• Single AZ: A new subnet in the VPC that is at least a /24.
• Multi AZ: 3 new subnets in the VPC that are at least /24 (one in each AZ).
• The subnets you set up should have external access to the internet (e.g., a Gateway with a public route to the internet or any other solution you have in place).
• Create an empty route table with association to the provided subnet(s).
• All below endpoints should be created of the type ‘interface’ for the provided subnets (note that an S3 endpoint is not required and will be created internally by the deployment process):
  • VPC endpoint for CloudFormation server: com.amazonaws.{AWS::Region}.cloudformation.
  • VPC endpoint for SSM connection to the cluster servers: com.amazonaws.{AWS::Region}.ssm
  • VPC endpoint for logs access (Cloudwatch): com.amazonaws.{AWS::Region}.logs
  • VPC endpoint for Lambda functions: com.amazonaws.{AWS::Region}.lambda
  • VPC endpoint for SSM notifications: com.amazonaws.{AWS::Region}.ssmmessages
  • VPC endpoint for Autoscaling: com.amazonaws.{AWS::Region}.autoscaling
  • VPC endpoint for EC2 Instances: com.amazonaws.{AWS::Region}.ec2
  • VPC endpoint for Load Balancer: com.amazonaws.{AWS::Region}.elasticloadbalancing