Amazon VPC
I'm moving most of my instances into Amazon VPC, and as far as I can tell, that means I can't launch them from within Ylastic. If that's the case, are you going to be adding support for VPC launching in the near future?
And if not, how do I launch instances in my VPC with Ylastic?
Support Staff 2 Posted by Ylastic on 09 Sep, 2010 09:50 PM
Hi Alex,
VPC is on our list, but no ETA yet. AWS has been keeping us real busy, as you can tell :-)
thanks
3 Posted by awheeler on 09 Sep, 2010 09:58 PM
Ok, thanks.
awheeler closed this discussion on 09 Sep, 2010 09:59 PM.
awheeler re-opened this discussion on 24 Sep, 2010 02:36 PM
4 Posted by awheeler on 24 Sep, 2010 02:36 PM
The only feature I really need in the VPC is the ability to select the subnet to launch instances in, that's it.
That alone would allow me to use ylastic exclusively for all of my ongoing EC2 needs.
Support Staff 5 Posted by Ylastic on 24 Sep, 2010 02:55 PM
Ok. Not very familiar with VPC. Would a normal ec2 describe instances return even the ones running in the VPC?
6 Posted by awheeler on 24 Sep, 2010 02:58 PM
Yes, it would, and it does.
It tends to show the security groups as default though.
7 Posted by awheeler on 24 Sep, 2010 03:02 PM
At launch time, instead of providing the security group, you would provide the subnet id instead.
The elasticfox interface just has a checkbox that enables a subnet drop-down list and disables the security group selection.
It would make sense to only show this option if the account has VPC subnets defined.
Support Staff 8 Posted by Ylastic on 24 Sep, 2010 03:03 PM
Ah, ok. Will look into the API to see if we can just add at least some of the VPC functionality easily.
thanks
9 Posted by awheeler on 24 Sep, 2010 03:06 PM
That would be fabulous, thank you.
10 Posted by awheeler on 09 Oct, 2010 01:47 PM
Any update on this?
Support Staff 11 Posted by Ylastic on 09 Oct, 2010 02:13 PM
It is on our list. We have a few other releases scheduled before this one.
thanks!
12 Posted by jack.murgia on 20 Mar, 2011 06:46 PM
+1 on this- with the recent expansion of features on this product we anticipate a great need for VPC management vis a vis launching instances, monitoring instances and scheduling tasks. http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/03/new-approach-amazon-ec2-networki...
Support Staff 13 Posted by Ylastic on 20 Mar, 2011 10:31 PM
It is on our list. AWS has not been giving us a breather with all the changes and updates :-)
14 Posted by mark on 25 Oct, 2011 09:33 PM
Really need to see support for this. VPC is now available in US West as well. Unfortunately, Ylastic won't be very useful for us anymore (with regard to managing instances) unless VPC support is added.
Support Staff 15 Posted by Ylastic on 25 Oct, 2011 10:10 PM
Sorry, but we still dont have an ETA for VPC support. We have done some initial work, but we are currently in the middle of an overhaul to our app UI, and this will only be done after that. The first part of the UI overhaul is a complete rewrite of the autoscaling page to add all the new scaling features(policies, alarms, actions, etc) and make it much simpler to use. This is almost complete and should be deployed out real soon. We are going take some of the UI patterns from the new scaling page and push it out to all the other pages. This will really help us streamline and simplify the UI more so that we can improve the AWS management experience even more. After that we will be in a better position to incorporate VPC support in.
thanks!
16 Posted by jack.murgia on 28 Oct, 2011 03:55 AM
One thing I noticed today is that EBS volumes attached to a VPC server are not available in the tasks area for snapshot scheduling. Is that something that is easily rectified?
Support Staff 17 Posted by Ylastic on 28 Oct, 2011 05:01 AM
VPC volumes cannot be retrieved through the normal EC2 api. You have to use the different VPC api for it. So we would need suport for VPC in order to get a list of those vols back.
18 Posted by noah.cantor on 25 Jan, 2012 01:01 PM
Do you have an update on this? It's been 3 months since the last response, and I imagine it's still important to get this working.
Support Staff 19 Posted by Ylastic on 25 Jan, 2012 01:07 PM
We are geting toward the end of our UI and backend updates. As soon as that is complete, VPC is our top priority.
thanks
Support Staff 20 Posted by Ylastic on 25 Jan, 2012 01:11 PM
A question for everyone on this thread. The current thought is to keep VPC UI separate from our normal UI by adding a VPC tab on the top right. The VPC tab will have its own nav menu with all of the VPC supported services. The reason we are thinking of this is that mixing VPC with normal views, might make it difficult from a UI perspective to view/manage things. Would love to hear what you guys think.
thanks
21 Posted by mark on 25 Jan, 2012 06:26 PM
I think that will probably work just fine. When you configure a VPC in AWS it pretty much is isolated from their regular public network anyway. It would be nice to be able to move instances between the public cloud and the VPC from within Ylastic.
22 Posted by awheeler on 25 Jan, 2012 07:19 PM
I think modeling after Amazon's console makes some sense here, in as much as they have a tab for VPC specific things, like creating, and registering a VPC and such.
However, all instances are on the same tab, regardless of whether they are in a VPC or not, and I think that model makes sense.
So, I can see a VPC specific view, but I'd also like to see and be able to manipulate VPC instances in the appropriate other vies.
Support Staff 23 Posted by Ylastic on 25 Jan, 2012 08:08 PM
@mark : Cloud you please clarify the part about moving instances between public and VPC.
@awheeler : The specific tab will also help in another way as we are also planning to do monitoring and scheduling for VPC. That keeps things separate. Are you saying that VPC instances should also show up in the public instances view?
thanks!
24 Posted by awheeler on 25 Jan, 2012 08:25 PM
Yes -- I don't see a compelling reason (yet) to separate them. After all, AWS doesn't differentiate by region or zone or VPC in their list -- however, I think you can sort by those values, so having that attribute listed, and perhaps being able to filter by that would be sufficient for my needs.
Also, the normal cli tools return the VPC nodes just like regular nodes.
25 Posted by mark on 25 Jan, 2012 08:28 PM
Hi. Perhaps this will help explain:
Migrate EC2 instance into VPC
Essentially, if you have existing instances in EC2 and want to move them to a VPC, you will need to save each instance into an AMI and then move that AMI into your VPC region, where you can create a new instance from the AMI. End result is a clone of the original system.
26 Posted by awheeler on 25 Jan, 2012 08:31 PM
ec2-describe-instances, and ec2-describe-volumes both show complete information, so I find it odd that an API elsewhere shows a differentiated data set. What API are you using that is not showing the VPC volumes and instances together with the non-VPC ones?
Support Staff 27 Posted by Ylastic on 25 Jan, 2012 08:44 PM
@mark: Got it!
@awheeler: Not saying that the APi is different. Asking about the usefulness or not of separating things completely from a management perspective of the public cloud resources vs VPC ones.
28 Posted by awheeler on 25 Jan, 2012 08:52 PM
I was referring to the post on 28 Oct, 2011 05:01 AM which suggests that different APIs must be used to access volums, but perhaps that is only an issue for scheduled snapshots.
Support Staff 29 Posted by Ylastic on 25 Jan, 2012 08:58 PM
Yes. Trying to figure out how to simplify VPC management while adding scheduling and monitoring on top of it without overwhelming the UI.
thanks!