Getting Started

Let's suppose you want to deploy DotNetNuke Community Edition, an open-source content management system (CMS). It's easy to get started, and for most of the tasks we can use the AWS Management Console. In this topic, we'll walk through a series of steps to deploy your web application to AWS. There are many different ways you can go about deploying your web application. The approach that this walkthrough takes follows best practices and uses several of the core services so you can see how they work together.

Before you begin deploying DotNetNuke using AWS, you'll need to sign up for an AWS account and install the Auto Scaling command line tools. Signing up for AWS gives you access to all of the services; however, you are charged only for what you use.

After you have signed up, you'll find a suitable AMI that meets your hardware and software needs. You'll use this AMI to launch an Amazon EC2 instance. When launching your Amazon EC2 instance, you'll create a new key pair and a security group. The security group sets rules for who can access the Amazon EC2 instance, and the key pair is necessary for connecting to your Amazon EC2 instance.

With your instance running and secured, you will finish installing the required software and then configure the DotNetNuke application. To simplify launching new Amazon EC2 instances that are already configured, you'll create a custom AMI that will become your new baseline.

You'll then create an Elastic Load Balancer to distribute the traffic load across multiple instances and then update your security group to allow HTTP traffic from only your load balancer instead of from everyone. You create your Elastic Load Balancer before you launch your instances so that you can associate your Auto Scaling group with your Elastic Load Balancer. That way, your load balancer can automatically stop routing traffic to any terminated instances, and it can start routing traffic to any newly launched instances.

At this point, you'll use Auto Scaling to launch your Amazon EC2 instances. You'll create an Auto Scaling policy that tells Auto Scaling when to increment or decrement the number of instances in your group.

Finally, you'll create a CloudWatch alarm that monitors the instances in your Auto Scaling group and tells the Auto Scaling group when to take action on that policy.

Because this is a sample deployment, you may want to terminate all the AWS resources that you have created. As soon as you terminate an AWS resource, you stop accruing charges for that resource.