Step 2. Access the Amazon EC2 cluster

After the AWS CloudFormation template has successfully launched you can access the Amazon EC2 cluster via HTTPS through a web portal or SSH.

Access the cluster through the web portal

Use the following procedure to access the cluster through the web portal:

1. After the solution has deployed, navigate to the stack Outputs tab

2. Copy the value for WebUserInterface, and paste the link into a web browser.

Note

It can take up to 15 minutes for the UI to be installed after the AWS CloudFormation template is completed.

To open the webpage, you must authorize the web browser to trust the self-signed security certificate (add an exception) or Upload a Server Certificate to the Elastic Load Balancer endpoint. Note that access to the web UI will be restricted to the subnet specified in the IP Address template parameter.

Access the cluster through SSH

Administrator SSH

By default, this solution installs the key pair that you provided in the Key Pair Name template parameter. Note that all SSH sessions are required to use public key encryption.

Additionally, this solution provides an admin connection string for operating systems with native SSH clients (Mac/Linux) in the Outputs section of the CloudFormation stack.

Note

It can take up to 15 minutes for final installation procedures to complete. During this time, attempts to login via SSH will generate a message indicating that the installation is still running.

User SSH

Users who access the cluster through SSH must download their PEM key. For more information on downloading your PEM/PPK key and setting up the SSH client, refer to How to access the solution.

Adding users to the cluster

Scale-Out Computing on AWS uses open LDAP for directory services. Administrators can interact with their directory using LDAP directly. This solution installs a custom wrapper that can be found in /apps/soca/cluster_manager/ldap_manager.py. This wrapper can be run by administrators logged in via SSH, or for quick actions via the web portal. For example, adding/deleting users, resetting user passwords, and granting and revoking administrator privileges.

Use the following procedure to create or delete a user through the user interface:

1. In Admin, navigate to Users Management.

2. Add and delete users.

Note

Deleting users will prevent user access to the cluster but will not remove associated $HOME directory and data.