AWS Documentation » Amazon AppStream 2.0 » Developer Guide » Fleets and Stacks

Fleets and Stacks

With Amazon AppStream 2.0, you create fleet instances and stacks as part of the process of streaming applications. A fleet consists of streaming instances that run the image that you specify. A stack consists of an associated fleet, user access policies, and storage configurations.

Contents

• Fleet Type
• Session Context
• Instance Families
• Create a Fleet and Stack
• Customize a Fleet
• Fleet Auto Scaling

Fleet Type

The fleet type determines when your instances run and how you pay for them. You can specify a fleet type when you create a fleet. You cannot change the fleet type after you create the fleet.

The following are the possible fleet types:

Always-On

Instances run all the time, even when no users are streaming applications.

On-Demand

Instances run only when users are streaming applications. Idle instances that are available for streaming are in a stopped state.

Use an Always-On fleet to provide your users with instant access to their applications. Use an On-Demand fleet to optimize your streaming charges and provide your users with access to their applications after a 1-2 minute wait. For more information, see Amazon AppStream 2.0 Pricing.

To create an On-Demand fleet, you must use a base image starting with 09-05-2017.

Session Context

You can pass parameters to your streaming application by using session context. The format is a string with parameters separated by commas. Session context is supported using the AWS CLI and the AWS SDKs, but is not supported using the AWS Management Console.

Starting with the images released on 09-05-2017, the parameters are passed using the AppStream_Session_Context environment variable. This environment variable is accessible only through .NET, and we provide an executable file, SessionContextRetriever.exe, that you can use to access it. With images released prior to 09-05-2017, parameters are passed to the application.

The following example uses session context to launch a specific website by using Google Chrome.

To use session context to launch a website

1. In the left navigation pane, choose Images, Image Builder.

2. Choose the image builder to use, verify that it is in the Running state, and choose Connect.

3. Log in to the image builder by doing either of the following:

   • If your image builder is not joined to an Active Directory domain, on the Local User tab, choose Administrator.

   • If your image builder is joined to an Active Directory domain and you require access to resources that are managed by Active Directory to install your applications, choose the Directory User tab, type the credentials for a domain user account that has local administrator permissions on the image builder, then choose Log in.

4. For this example, install Google Chrome on the image builder. For more information, see Step 1: Install Applications on the Image Builder.

5. Create a child folder of C:\. For this example, use C:\Scripts.

6. For images released on or after 09-05-2017, download SessionContextRetriever.exe and copy this script to C:\Scripts.

7. Create a Windows batch file in the new folder. For this example, create C:\Scripts\session-context-test.bat and add a script that launches Chrome with the URL from session context, and then waits for keyboard input.

   For images released on or after 09-05-2017, use the following script:

   for /f "tokens=* usebackq" %%f in ('C:\Scripts\SessionContextRetriever.exe') do (
   set var=%%f
   )
   chrome.exe %var%
   pause

   For images released prior to 09-05-2017, use the following script:

   chrome.exe %1
   pause

8. In Image Assistant, add session-context-test.bat and change the working directory to C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application so that the .exe that is specified in the .bat directory can be called.

   You do not need to add Chrome. This step requires that you add only the batch file.

9. Create an image, fleet, and stack. For this example, use a fleet name of session-context-test-fleet and a stack name of session-context-test-stack.

10. After the fleet is running, you can call create-streaming-url with the session-context parameter, as shown in this example.

    aws appstream create-streaming-url --stack-name session-context-test-stack \ 
    --fleet-name session-context-test-fleet \
    --user-id username –-validity 10000 \
    --application-id chrome --session-context "www.google.com"

11. Open the streaming URL in a browser. The batch file launches Chrome and loads http://www.google.com.