Create a demo environment - Research and Engineering Studio

Create a demo environment

Follow the steps in this section to try out Research and Engineering Studio on AWS. This demo deploys a non-production environment with a minimal set of parameters using the Research and Engineering Studio on AWS demo environment stack template. It uses a Keycloak server for SSO.

Note that after you deploy the stack, you must follow the Post deployment steps below to set up users in the environment before you login.

Create a one-click demo stack

This AWS CloudFormation stack creates all the components required by Research and Engineering Studio.

Time to deploy: ~90 minutes

Prerequisites

Create an AWS account with an administrative user

You must have an AWS account with an administrative user:

  1. Open https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup.

  2. Follow the online instructions.

    Part of the sign-up procedure involves receiving a phone call and entering a verification code on the phone keypad.

    When you sign up for an AWS account, an AWS account root user is created. The root user has access to all AWS services and resources in the account. As a security best practice, assign administrative access to a user, and use only the root user to perform tasks that require root user access.

Create an Amazon EC2 SSH key pair

If you do not have Amazon EC2 SSH key pair, you will need to create one. For more information, see Create a key pair using Amazon EC2 in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Increase service quotas

We recommend increasing the service quotas for:

  • Amazon VPC

    • Increase the Elastic IP address quota per NAT gateway from five to eight

    • Increase the NAT gateways per Availability Zone from five to ten

  • Amazon EC2

    • Increase the EC2-VPC Elastic IPs from five to ten

Your AWS account has default quotas, formerly referred to as limits, for each AWS service. Unless otherwise noted, each quota is Region-specific. You can request increases for some quotas, and other quotas cannot be increased. For more information, see Quotas for AWS services in this product.

Create resources and input parameters

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS CloudFormation console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudformation.

    Note

    Make sure you are in your administrator account.

  2. Launch the template in the console.

  3. Under Parameters, review the parameters for this product template and modify them as necessary.

    Parameter Default Description
    EnvironmentName <res-demo> A unique name given to your RES environment starting with res-, no longer than 11 characters, and no capital letters.
    AdministratorEmail The email address for the user completing setup of the product. This user additionally functions as a break-glass user if there is an Active Directory single sign on integration failure.
    KeyPair The key pair used to connect to infrastructure hosts.
    ClientIPCidr <0.0.0.0/0> IP address filter which limits connection to the system. You can update the ClientIpCidr after deployment.
    InboundPrefixList (Optional) Provide a managed prefix list for IPs allowed to directly access the web UI and SSH into the bastion host.

Post deployment steps

  1. Reset user passwords in AWS Directory Service– The demo stack creates four users with usernames which you can use: admin1, user1, admin2, and user2.

    1. Go to the Directory Service console.

    2. Select the Directory Id for your environment. You can get the Directory Id from the output of <StackName>*DirectoryService* stack.

    3. From the top right Action dropdown menu, select Reset user password.

    4. For all the users you want to use, put the username and type in the password you want to have and choose Reset Password.

  2. Once you have reset the user passwords, you will need to wait for Research and Engineering Studio to sync the users in the environment. Research and Engineering Studio syncs the users every hour at xx.00. You can either wait for that to happen or follow the steps listed in User added in Active Directory, but missing from RES to sync the users immediately.

Your deployment is now ready. Use the EnvironmentUrl you received in your email to access the UI, or you can also get the same URL from the output of the deployed stack. You may now login to the Research and Engineering Studio environment with the user and password that you reset the password for in Active Directory.