Using Vault with Amazon AWS Cloud Service

[esalwan]

Hi All,

I am doing research into whether Vault can be installed and successfully used with the Amazon AWS cloud offering.  The use case is a small engineering company with limited hardware infrastructure.  Rather than purchase server infrastructure for a Vault implementation, we would like to use an Amazon AWS virtual SQL server.

Has anyone done this or considered it in the past?  Any pros/cons, suggestions, ideas would be very much appreciated.

Thank you,

Eric

[olearya]

I would say the main con is that this is not supported by Autodesk.

[PaulMunford]

You might find this interesting:

http://cadtoolbox.com/2012/11/13/azure/

[tmoney2007]

Functionally, its no different from having all of your production servers hosted offsite.

My company runs their entire prouction enviroment from an offsite data center using virtual machines. The fact that it is a "cloud" doesn't change anything as long as Amazon allows you to configure the things that need to be configured (which I can't imagine they would restrict.) Virtual machines are supported, so I can't imagine there would be an issue. Support isn't ever going to actually touch the server, so it doesn't much matter where they are physically located.

It depends on the specifics of your company, but hardware to run vault really wouldn't cost that much, while getting a windows server, SQL server and a storage server might add up over time.

[esalwan]

Hi all,

Thanks for the feedback. 

Our next step will be to do a POC.  The network/internet speeds and the possible bottlenecks of having the data offsite are the biggest concerns.  If anyone has any further experiences/insights to share, please do.

Best regards,

Eric

[ForrestJudd]

This is an old post but for the benefit of others I thought I'd post the results of some testing I've done with Vault Basic 2015 and an AWS EC2 instance.

I tested with about 400 parts, with a total size of 71 MB.  Checking in to the vault on the AWS instance took about two minutes.  Checking in on my local system (which is as fast as you can possibly get; client and server are on the same system and the disk is SSD) took about 30 seconds.  I was pleasantly surprised at the performance of the Vault on AWS, and while more testing would certainly be in order it looks to be at least feasible from a technical standpoint.

From a cost perspective I’m really not sure what to expect.  At idle on a t2.micro Vault Basic appears to be using about 0.5 CPU Credits.  When checking in files it bursted to nearly one CPU credit.  During installation it bursted to about 5 CPU credits.

I expect Vault Pro would be a bit more intensive, but even if you went with the most expensive tier of t2 (t2.medium), if you went with a reserved instance and paid for a year up front it would be only $455 at current prices.  If Vault is the only thing running, and if it’s used during a normal business day, then I expect on a t2.medium you would probably accumulate enough CPU Credits during off-hours to provide for any necessary bursts during the work day.

Additional storage would be extra of course – if you went with traditional storage it looks like it would cost maybe another $200/year for about 300 GB of additional storage.

That’s really a pretty cost effective solution if my numbers are correct, and the performance doesn’t seem terrible.

[PaulMunford]

Great Information. Thanks for taking the time to come back here and share it ForrestJudd 😄

[scottmoyse]

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@PaulMunford wrote:
Great Information. Thanks for taking the time to come back here and share it ForrestJudd 😄

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Agreed. Thanks!

[matthewweake1]

Has anyone tried to run the database in the cloud and the file store locally?

Thinking that using the database in the cloud would be fast and the local filestore fast and cheap.

Not sure how backups would work.

Not my area of experise.

Regards

Matthew Weake

[johannes.bauer · Accepted solution]

Hi all,
Irvin Hayes held a class about this at AU you can find it here:
http://au.autodesk.com/au-online/classes-on-demand/class-catalog/2014/vault/pl6015-p
Whereas it is now supported.

Thank you.

[scottmoyse]

Perfect! I'm surprised I had forgotten about that class. As soon as I read the description I remembered Irvin had done it. Cheers

[dblack]

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I wanted to thank @ForrestJudd for his detail of running Vault on EC2. This was the only post I could find on the subject, and as it turns out, it's exactly what I need for my small project team to work offsite, and it works great. I have Vault Basic 2017 running on Server 2012 on t2.micro free tier on AWS and it works just dandy. I have about 260 parts comprising about 160MB of data. It uses about 0.8 gigs of the available 1 gig of memory, so I may go to t2.small just to have a little more overhead. I've wanted to do this for years. Glad I finally got it working!

[dblack]

Just wanted to provide an update. When running the ADMS Console, I was down to practically no memory left on the 1GB instance. So, I upgraded to t2.small for 2GB memory, and I  loaded a 10 Gig file store and databases for six vaults, and the server idles at 1.1GB usage now, so, plenty of overhead. For anyone looking to get started with Vault on AWS EC2, go for the t2.small. The t2.micro won't get you too far.

[tolgay.hickiran]

Thread is a lifesaver for me now! Any new data for the particular subject?

[ihayesjr]

Some clarity for this thread. Please refer to the virtualization guidelines for what is or is not supported.

We will support Vault in the hosted environment but not the hosted environment.

Virtual Installation Guidelines

Technical Support for Virtual Installation

Technical support is provided to make sure your Autodesk software is working properly. We do not, however, provide technical support for your chosen virtual environment. If you do encounter an issue that requires technical support, you may be required to verify that the behavior is related to your Autodesk software and not the virtual environment. 

Our technical support experts will ask you to replicate the behavior in a physical environment. If the problem can be replicated in a physical environment, we are happy to help find a solution. However, if it cannot be replicated, we recommend you contact your virtualization provider for support.

Here is information for Vault specifically.

Virtualization Best Practices and Tips for Vault