Creating an Elastic Load Balancer

You can use the AWS Management Console to create an ELB and add EC2 instances to it. Steps for doing this are as follows:

Steps:
  1. Log in to the AWS Management Console and click Load Balancers.
  2. Click Create Load Balancer.
  3. Type a load balancer name, then choose the ports and protocols to be used by your load balancer. You need to define the port on which HTTP traffic will enter the load blancer (Load Balancer Port) and the port to which HTTP traffic will be forwarded (Instance Port).

    In many ArcGIS Server scenarios, you can set the Load Balancer Port as 80 and the Instance Port as 6080, which is ArcGIS Server's port. In order to save this rule in the AWS Management Console, you'll need to remove the default rule of 80 forwarding to 80. If you have configured the Web Adaptor on your instance, you would use the Web Adaptor port for the Instance Port instead of 6080.

    When you've finished setting these values, click Continue.

  4. Set the configuration options for the load balancer health check.

    Your load balancer periodically checks its attached instances to ensure that they are still responsive. The checks are performed by pinging a page on the instance, by default /index.html, and determining whether a valid response was returned. You must either configure a page /index.html on your instances or change the value for Ping Path to a page located at an identical location on each instance. A good setting for Ping Path is a page related to your GIS server implementation, such as the REST URL of one of your map services.

    When you've finished configuring the health check, click Continue.

  5. Click Continue to skip the wizard panel that adds instances to the load balancer.

    You can add instances to your load balancer at a later time. You don't have to add any instances right now to create the load balancer.

  6. Review the information about your load balancer and, if necessary, go back and make any corrections. When you're satisfied with the configuration options, click Create to create the load balancer.
  7. Click Close to close the wizard.
  8. Find your new load balancer in the Load Balancers section of the AWS Management Console. Note the DNS name of the load balancer. To take advantage of the load balancer, you should now include this in any URLs that you use to reference your GIS server site.
12/29/2014