CIT 668 Assignment #2

2-Tier Web Site with Horizontal Scaling Due: April 2, 2014

In this assignment, we will build a CloudFormation template that creates a two tier dynamic
web site that provides horizontal scaling at the web server tier using an elastic load balancer.

1 Materials
To complete this assignment, the student will need the following materials:

1. An Elastic Load Balancer instance.

2. Two EC2 instances that are web servers, running Apache and WordPress.

3. One instance that is a database server.

All AWS resources must be tagged with a key called Name whose value is your name. Tag
each instance with a ServerType tag whose value is one of WebServer1, WebServer2, or
DBServer.
Remember to stop instances that are not currently active and terminate in-
stances once you are done.

2 CloudFormation Template
Base your template on the one constructed in the CloudFormation lab. Expand the template
to include the additional web server instance that must be set up identically to the first web
server instance and to include the elastic load balancer.

3 Testing the Template

Verify that your template brings up a working 2-tier web site when instantiated. Perform
failover testing as we did in the ELB lab by stopping Apache on one of the two instances
and verifying both that the site works with one instance down and that the site will use both
instances after you restart Apache.

1
4 Report
For this assignment, you need to turn in both an electronic copy of the report by e-mail
to your instructor and a hardcopy in class. The e-mail must have the subject “CIT 668
Assignment 2”. The attached assignment report file must be in Open Document Format
(ODF) have the filename cit668-assignment2-USERNAME.odt, where USERNAME is replaced
with your AWS username. The e-mail must also include your CloudFormation template as
an attachment with the name cit668-assignment2-USERNAME.template. You do not need
to turn in a hardcopy of the template.
The report must include all of the sections listed below. Except for the title page, sections
must begin with the name of the title below using boldface type.

1. Title Page containing the title of the assignment, your name, the name of the class
and section, your instructor’s name, and the date the assignment was submitted.

2. Introduction A single paragraph that describes the objectives or purpose of the as-
signment.

3. Materials List all materials used in the assignment, including EC2 images, instances,
keypairs, and S3 buckets. Include instance, image, and S3 identifiers (names or Amazon
IDs) in your descriptions.

4. Methods Describe the modifications you made to the lab template to create the 2-tier
load balanced template. Include any mistakes that you made and how you identified
and corrected them. Describe your testing procedure and the results of that procedure.

5. Conclusion A short summary of the assignment, including a discussion of the advan-

tages and disadvantages of creating a CloudFormation template compared with setting
up a 2-tier architecture manually.

5 References
1. AWS CLI Reference Manual, http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/

2. CloudFormation Documentation, https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/cloudformation/

3. EC2 User Guide, http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/