Introduction

This guide is designed to provide you with all of the required steps for deploying a Lightbits storage cluster on AWS, using CloudFormation (CF) and AWS Marketplace. The guide will also detail how to use the Lightbits AWS backup and restore feature.

Terminology

• AMI - Amazon Machine Image
• ASG - Auto-Scaling Group
• AWS Lambda - AWS serverless, event-driven compute service.
• AWS Parameter Store - AWS service to securely store hierarchical parameters and configurations.
• AWS S3 - Scalable, highly available, and durable storage service. Data backed up to S3 can be stored for long periods of time.
• AWS VPC - AWS Virtual Private Cloud
• Backup - The process of taking a full copy of the data, or incremental changes of each available volume in the cluster and store it to S3.
• Backup Repo (Repository) - The location of where to store the backed-up data in S3.
• CF - CloudFormation
• CF Stack - A collection of AWS resources that you can manage as a single unit.
• CFT - CloudFormation Template
• i3en - A class of AWS storage instances.
• I4i - A newer class of AWS storage instances.
• Restore - The process of restoring a volume from S3 and creating a new volume with the data from S3.
• Retention - The period of time to keep the backups on S3.
• SDS - Lightbits Scale-out Disaggregated Storage

A few notes about CF:

• CF is a form of “AWS language” used to orchestrate infrastructure and deploy services.
• CF Stack is a collection of resources and infrastructure created by a CF template.
• A deployed CF stack includes all of the required resources and infrastructure for Lightbits' SDS on AWS.

The following sections explain how to create such a CF stack using the following methods:

• Using the AWS Marketplace.
• Using the AWS Web Console.
• Using the AWS command line interface (CLI) tool (awscli).

Relevant Documents

The AWS Guide is part of a documentation set that includes the following Lightbits Support documentation.