AWS Quirks and Fake News to the Delphix Admin Console

We’ve been working hard to create an incredible new trial version of Delphix that uses AWS, which is built with the open source product Terraform.  Terraform is a tool that anyone can use to build, version and manage a product effectively and seamlessly in a number of clouds.  We are currently using it to implement to AWS, but there is a bright future for these types of open source products and I’m really impressed with how easy its made it to deploy compute instances, the Delphix Engine and supporting architecture on AWS EC2.  If you’d like to read up on Terraform, check out their website.

The Delphix Admin Console and Faults

After building out the Delphix environment with the Engine and the a Linux source/target, the first step for many is to log into the Delphix Admin console.  You can view any faults during the build at the upper right corner under Faults. One error that I’ve noticed comes up in after a successful build is the following:

AWS Console to the Rescue

By logging into your AWS EC2 console, you can view the instances that are being used.  As you’ll note, the error says that the Delphix Engine is using an unsupported  instance type m4.large.  Yes in our EC2 console, we can see the Delphix Engine, (last in the list and with the name ending in “DE”) that no, actually it isn’t.

It’s actually a m4.xlarge instance type.  What’s even more interesting, is that the Linux Target, (LT) and Linux Source, (LS) are both m4.large instance types, yet no warning was issued for either of these instances as unsupported.

AWS EC2 Supported Instance Types

You can locate what types of instance types are supported for AWS EC2 with the following link.  At this page, we can also see that both the m4.large and the m4.xlarge instance type IS SUPPORTED.

Knowing that we’ve validated that the instance type is supported means that I can safely ignore it and proceed to work through the trial without worry.

If you’re planning on deploying a production Delphix Engine on AWS, inspect the following document to ensure you build it with the proper configuration.

Nothing to see here and thought I better let everyone know before someone lumps Amazon with CNN… 🙂