Tutorial on Setup of iExperiment Free Trial on Amazon Web Services – Part 1

This is the first part of a three part video tutorial describing the setup of a free trial versions of iExperiment, our enterprise electronic notebook, on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this tutorial, the following topics will be demonstrated:

  • Creating a Security Group (a set of Firewall settings) for iExperiment using the AWS Management Console
  • Creating a Key Pair to access the iExperiment EC2 instance in the AWS Management Console
  • Creating an iExperiment EC2 instance from the public iExperiment machine image on AWS in the AWS Management Console
  • Creating an Elastic IP address and associating it with an iExperiment EC2 instance using the AWS Management Console. We will not go over how to associate the iExperiment domain name with an IP address, because this is domain name server-dependent.

A transcript of the video can be found below.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us.

Tutorial Transcript: Setup of iExperiment Free Trial on Amazon Web Services – Part 1

Hi, and welcome to part one of Colabrativ’s tutorial on setting up iExperiment using the public iExperiment Amazon Web Services machine image.
In this part of the tutorial we will create and launch an Amazon Web Services instance of iExperiment.
In the second part, we will start the server’s services, add our institution, add ourselves as the primary administrator, and review and agree to the software evaluation agreement.
In the third part, we will add a researcher and assign them to a permission group.
Amazon’s cloud computing environment is called Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 for short. A Get Started with EC2 guide can be found on Amazon Web Services website.
For this demonstration, we will use Mozilla’s Firefox browser on a computer running Windows 7.
If you do not already have an Amazon Web Services account, you will need to sign up for one. The ”Sign up for EC2” link guides you through the signup process.

Having signing up, we login into the Amazon Web Services, also known as AWS Management Console.
We have already logged on to Colabrativ’s Amazon account, opened the AWS Management Console to the EC2 tab, and selected the “US West” Region.
To create an EC2 instance of iExperiment, you will first need to create a security group and key pair.
First we will create a Security Group for iExperiment. Under the “NETWORK & SECURITY” header select the “Security Groups” option.
In the “Security Groups” panel click on the “Create Security Group” button.
In the pop-up menu, give the security group a name, such as “iExperiment”, and a description, such as “Open ports 22, 80, 443, 8080 and 8443”; then click the “Yes, Create” button.
Click on the “iExperiment” security group we just created. Details of that security group will be shown in the panel below the list. Click on the “Inbound” tab. Currently the security group has no inbound rules.
From the “Create a new rule” pull-down menu, select “SSH”, then click on the “Add Rule” button. The new rule will be displayed.
Security can be further tightened on any rule by restricting the “Source” IP addresses. More information on security can be found by opening Security Group Help.
Next, select “HTTP” from the “Create a new rule” menu; then click on the “Add Rule” button.
Next, select “HTTPS” from the “Create a new rule” menu; then click on the “Add Rule” button.
Leave “Custom TCP rule” selected in the “Create a new rule” menu, then enter 8080 for the “port range”, then click on the “Add Rule” button.
Again leaving “Custom TCP rule” selected in the “Create a new rule” menu, enter 8443 for the “port range”, then click on the “Add Rule” button.
Finally, click on the “Apply Rule Changes” button.

Next we need to create a Key Pair. Access to an EC2 instance is controlled by a username and key pair and not by a username and password.
Under the “NETWORK & SECURITY” header select “Key Pairs” option.
In the Key Pairs panel click on the “Create Key Pair” button.
Enter a “Key Pair Name”, such as iExperiment, and click the “Create” button.
The key pair you just created will be downloaded to you. Save the key pair in an appropriate place.

Now we are ready to create an EC2 instance. From the navigation panel on the left side of the Management Console click on the “Instances” option under the “INSTANCES” header;
In the “My Instances” panel click on the “Launch Instance” button. A “Create a new instance” popup will appear.
Select the “Launch Classic Wizard” option from the “Create a new instance” wizard and click the “continue” button.
Select the “Community AMIs” tab; then type “iexperiment” into the unlabeled box below the “Community AMIs” tab. This should bring up all of the iExperiment Amazon Machine Images, as known as AMIs.
Select the “61-day iExperiment Evaluation” AMI.
In the next tab choose an instance type. For a few users the “micro 613 mega byte” instance will works fine. For a large group of users use the small 1.7 Giga byte instance. Then click the “Continue” button.
On the next two screens nothing needs to be entered, so click on the “Continue” button on both.
On the CREATE KEY PAIR screen, select the “Key Pairs” that you would like to use to access the EC2 instance. Here we will use the “Colabrativ-7” key pair. Then click the “Continue” button.
In the “CONFIGURE FIREWALL” step, select the “iExperiment” Security Group and then click the “Continue” button.
On the final “Review” step we can review and change any of the instance details before we click on the “Launch” button. After clicking on the “Launch” button, we close the Launch Instance Wizard by clicking on the “Close” button.
Clicking on the EC2 instance we just created will display the details of the instance, including its Id, State, Block Devices and the Public DNS.

The final steps in the setup of the iExperiment EC2 instance involve associating an Elastic IP address with the server, and then using the Elastic IP address to associate a domain name with the iExperiment EC2 instance.
Under the “NETWORK & SECURITY” header, select the “Elastic IPs” option.
In the “addresses” panel click on the “Allocate New Address” button, then click the “Yes, Allocate” button.
Right click on the IP address you just created, and select “Associate”.
In the “Associate Address” pop-up window select the instance ID of the iExperiment instance we created above from the “Instance:” pull-down menu, then click the “Yes, Associate” button.
The associated Elastic IP can now be associated with an iExperiment domain name in a Domain Name Server. We will not go over how to associate the iExperiment domain name with an IP address, because this is server-dependent.
This completes the first part of the tutorial on setting up iExperiment from the iExperiment AMI on Amazon Web Services.
In the next part of this tutorial we will use eln.colabrativ.com as the iExperiment domain name. There we will start the server’s services, add our institution, add ourselves as the primary administrator, and review and agree to the Software Evaluation Agreement

If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us at Colabrativ.com.

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