Table of contents
  1. 1. Objective
  2. 2. Create an Elastic IP

Objective

To set up two Elastic IPs for the front-ends of your production deployment. Amazon's Elastic IP (IP) addresses allow you to allocate an IP address and assign it to an instance of your choice, which replaces the need for normal dynamic IP addressing in the cloud.  Elastic IPs are dynamically remappable IP addresses that make it easier to manage servers and make global changes compared to static IPs on traditional hosting solutions.  It's a way of ensuring that you don't 'inherit' traffic from other's servers on EC2, because you're using an IP that's specifically reserved for your usage only, as long as you keep that EIP.  See Elastic IP (EIP) for more information.

By default, an account can have a maximum of five Elastic IPs.  Amazon charges you $0.01/hr for each unused EIP that you reserve because you're essentially taking away another IP address from the pool that another person could use for their site.  If you want to create more than 5 EIPs, you can submit a request to Amazon at Request to Increase Elastic IP Address Limit.

For a conceptual diagram and example of how you can use EIPs to update a site, see our blog post DNS, Elastic IPs (EIP) and how things fit together when upgrading a server or read the section on on Designing Failover Architectures on EC2.

NOTE: This tutorial only applies to Premium accounts.  If you have a Developer account and would like to upgrade, please contact sales@rightscale.com.

Create an Elastic IP

Go to Clouds -> AWS -> Elastic IPs.  Click the New button. 

In a couple of minutes a new Elastic IP address will be added to your account.  Refresh your window and you should see the IP address that was just created.  Click on the Elastic IPs nickname and change the name to fe1.

03-eip_new_listed.gif

 

Create another EIP and name it fe2.  Be sure to write down the IP addresses for the front-end servers because you will need to list them in the next step.

04-eip_all_listed.gif

Congratulations!  You now have two Elastic IPs that you can associate to an EC2 instance.  You can either attach an Elastic IP to instance at boot time or to a running instance.  See Elastic IP (EIP) to learn more about the best practices on using EIPs.  You will need to select these EIPs when you launch a server in one of the Application Server Setup tutorials.

05-eip_launch_server.gif

 

 

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Viewing 3 of 3 comments: view all
The naming of the EIPs in the text is different than the pictures:
"Click on the EIPs nickname and change the name to FE-1." and "Create another EIP and name it FE-2." Should probably use "fe1" and "fe2" to avoid confusion.
Posted 23:27, 23 Jun 2008
Thanks for the comment blitzlocal. I've updated the descriptions accordingly. Thanks for the helpful feedback. -Dean
Posted 00:07, 24 Jun 2008
You may want to include the IP Address in the Nick name so you can see that value later in the Deployment Screens.

If you have a DNS name for an EIP then the DNS name would also be a nice name to use.

For Example:

wiki.RightScale.com

This would be a nice name for the EIP used for this Wiki.

Ed@RightScale.com
Posted 06:04, 29 Jul 2008
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