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elastic beanstalk and shared storage
Posted by: dishbreaker
Posted on: Sep 7, 2011 4:18 PM
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beanstalk , nfs , storage , ebs
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I have a web application on elastic beanstalk that allows users to upload files. These files will then get processed by other background applications running on various ec2 instances. This requires some kind of shared storage since EBS volumes can only be mounted to a single instance. My initial thought was to expose the EBS volume through NFS, however I am having a lot of problems mounting NFS share on the beanstalk instance.

Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to make a beanstalk instance a NFS client? (NFS4) If this is totally on the wrong path to accomplish what I want, any other tips are appreciated as well.

Thanks
Permlink Replies: 8 | Pages: 1 - Last Post: Sep 9, 2011 10:06 AM by: dishbreaker
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Re: elastic beanstalk and shared storage
Posted by: stepanian
Posted on: Sep 7, 2011 4:46 PM
in response to: dishbreaker in response to: dishbreaker
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What about S3?
Re: elastic beanstalk and shared storage
Posted by: dishbreaker
Posted on: Sep 8, 2011 11:01 AM
in response to: stepanian in response to: stepanian
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We have considered s3, but it requires use of either the s3 api or third party such as s3fs. EBS and NFS seemed to be simpler at the time.
Re: elastic beanstalk and shared storage
Posted by: Saad@AWS
Posted on: Sep 8, 2011 11:22 AM
in response to: dishbreaker in response to: dishbreaker
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Hi dishbreaker,

You should be able to mount NFS shares to your Elastic Beanstalk instances. In order to automatically mount the share, you will need to create a custom AMI and use it with Elastic Beanstalk. Here are some docs that might help: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/index.html?using-features.customami.html.

If this doesn't work for you, can you please outline what problems are you facing? Is your instance not able to mount the NFS share?

Thanks,

Saad
Re: elastic beanstalk and shared storage
Posted by: dishbreaker
Posted on: Sep 8, 2011 12:08 PM
in response to: Saad@AWS in response to: Saad@AWS
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Here is the command I use to test:

sudo mount -t nfs4 xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/ebs_volume /storage

Here is the result:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/ebs_volume,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
(for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might
need a /sbin/mount.<type> helper program)
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

The same nfs share is mounted successfully on a different ec2 instance.
Re: elastic beanstalk and shared storage
Posted by: Saad@AWS
Posted on: Sep 8, 2011 12:30 PM
in response to: dishbreaker in response to: dishbreaker
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Thank you for the details!

Can your Elastic Beanstalk instance ping the EC2 instance running the NFS share? If not, I suspect that the NFS share is running under a different security group, hence the 2 instances cannot talk to each other.

To fix that, you can follow the steps highlighted here: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=233304&#233304.

Saad
Re: elastic beanstalk and shared storage
Posted by: dishbreaker
Posted on: Sep 8, 2011 1:03 PM
in response to: Saad@AWS in response to: Saad@AWS
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It is running under a different security group. After I opened up ICMP, i was able to ping the instance with the NFS share.

I have inbound rules on tcp port 111,2049 and udp 111 for both the elasticbeanstalk-default group and its ip. However, mounting still results in the same error message.

Is there anything I have to do to enable nfs4 on the elastic beanstalk ami?
Re: elastic beanstalk and shared storage
Posted by: Saad@AWS
Posted on: Sep 8, 2011 1:50 PM
in response to: dishbreaker in response to: dishbreaker
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By default, Elastic Beanstalk doesn't install anything specific to run a NFS client on the EC2 instance. Elastic Beanstalk uses EC2 instances running the Amazon Linux AMI. I suspect there are some packages/libraries/services missing that you might need installed, in order to successfully mount the share.

What is the operating system and what's installed on the other EC2 instance (that succesfully mounted the share)?

You can use the yum repo on the Elastic Beanstalk instance to install missing dependencies (try running "yum list | grep nfs" for a list of nfs utils).

Thanks,

Saad
Re: elastic beanstalk and shared storage
Posted by: dishbreaker
Posted on: Sep 9, 2011 10:06 AM
in response to: Saad@AWS in response to: Saad@AWS
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Thanks for you help, originally I thought nfs-utils is only needed by servers. I was able to get it to work after installing it.