Chapter 1. About Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a service operated by amazon.com, provides customers with a customizable virtual computing environment. With this service, an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) can be booted to create a virtual machine or instance. Users can install the software they require on an instance and are charged according to the capacity used. Amazon EC2 is designed to be flexible and allows users to quickly scale their deployed applications.

See the Amazon Web Services website for more information.

About Amazon Machine Images

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a template for an EC2 virtual machine instance. Users create EC2 instances by selecting an appropriate AMI to create the instance from. The primary component of an AMI is a read-only filesystem that contains an installed operating system as well as other software. Each AMI has different software installed for different use cases. Amazon EC2 includes many AMIs that both Amazon Web Services and third parties provide. Users can also create their own custom AMIs.

About Red Hat Cloud Access

Red Hat Cloud Access is a Red Hat subscription feature that provides support for JBoss EAP on Red Hat certified cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. Red Hat Cloud Access allows you to move your subscriptions between traditional servers and public cloud-based resources in a simple and cost-effective manner.

You can find more information about Red Hat Cloud Access on the Customer Portal.

Red Hat Cloud Access Features

Membership in the Red Hat Cloud Access program provides access to supported private Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) created by Red Hat.

The Red Hat AMIs have the following software pre-installed and fully supported by Red Hat:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • JBoss EAP
  • Product updates with RPMs using Red Hat Update Infrastructure

Each of the Red Hat AMIs is only a starting point, requiring further configuration to the requirements of your application.

Important

Red Hat Cloud Access does not currently provide support for the full-ha profile, in either standalone instances or a managed domain.

Note

For information about installing Red Hat JBoss Operations Network, see the Red Hat JBoss Operations Network Installation Guide.

For information about configuring Red Hat JBoss Operations Network, see Configuring JBoss ON Servers, Agents, and Storage Nodes.

Supported Amazon EC2 Instance Types

Red Hat Cloud Access supports the following Amazon EC2 instance types. See Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide for Linux Instances for more information about each instance.

Table 1.1. Supported Amazon EC2 Instance Types

Instance TypeDescription

Standard Instance

Standard Instances are general purpose environments with a balanced memory-to-CPU ratio. The smallest instance types available, which are capable of handling JBoss EAP, are t2.small and m3.medium.

High Memory Instance

High Memory Instances have more memory allocated to them than Standard Instances. High Memory Instances are suited for high throughput applications such as databases or memory caching applications. Smallest available and supported instance type is r3.large.

High CPU Instance

High CPU Instances have more CPU resources allocated than memory and are suited for relatively low throughput but CPU intensive applications. Smallest available and supported instance types are c3.large and c4.large.

Important

The instance types Micro (t2.micro) and Nano (t2.nano) are not suitable for deployment of JBoss EAP. JBoss EAP 7.3 AMIs are built from a snapshot, which requires a volume of at least 10 GB. This can be set in EC2 console when creating the instance. If the volume assigned is too small, the instance creation will fail.

Supported Red Hat AMIs

The supported Red Hat AMIs can be identified by their names. JBoss EAP AMIs are named using the following syntax: 

RHEL-osversion-_HVM_GA-JBEAP-version-creationdate-arch-1-Access2-GP2
  • version is the version number of JBoss EAP installed in the AMI. Example 6.3.
  • osversion is the version number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux installed in the AMI. Example 6.2.
  • arch is the architecture of the AMI. This will be x86_64 or i386.
  • creationdate is the date that the AMI was created in the format of YYYYMMDD. Example 20160315.

Example AMI name: RHEL-7.3_HVM_GA-JBEAP-7.1.0_-20170703-x86_64-1-Access2-GP2.