Here are some frequently asked questions about Cloud Edition for Lustre on Amazon Web Services:


Q: How is Cloud Edition provided to AWS customers?

A: Cloud Edition for Lustre software is provided as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) via Amazon Marketplace. Amazon Marketplace embeds product codes in the published AMIs, and these product codes are used to bill the customer’s account for usage of the product as well as provide support entitlements.


Q: Can Cloud Edition be added to customer-developed private AMIs as a standalone product installation?

A: No. The Cloud Edition product is a complete solution for deploying, managing and monitoring a Lustre filesystem in AWS. Think of it as an appliance model. All of the integration, QA and tuning is part of the delivered solution; it’s much more than just a few packages to be installed.


Q: Can the published Marketplace AMI be customized and used to create private derivative AMIs?

A: Yes, this is supported. When a derivative private AMI is created in a customer account, the original Marketplace product codes are retained by the derived AMI. Whamcloud cannot assist with the customization process, but will support customizations that do not interfere with the operation of Cloud Edition functionality. An example of a supported customization might be something like site-specific IDS requirements mandating certain auditing packages to be installed and configured on every instance. Rather than having to re-install/re-configure these packages every time a Lustre server instance is deployed, the customer could start an instance running our published AMI, perform the required customizations, then create a derived AMI which is private to their account. They would then substitute their private AMI’s ID in the CloudFormation templates and create a new Cloud Edition filesystem as usual. The instances created using this method would now include the customizations but would otherwise function the same.


Q: Can Cloud Edition be run in a completely private VPC (i.e. no access to the public Internet)?

A: No. Cloud Edition is a complete solution for creating and running a Highly-Available Lustre filesystem in AWS. As such, it requires access to AWS APIs in order to perform initial filesystem configuration as well as to automatically respond to failover events which would otherwise bring the filesystem to a halt. For more information about Cloud Edition network requirements and details, please see Cloud Edition Networking.


Q: What are Worker instances?

A: The Worker instances specified in the Cloud Formation templates are used to run Lustre HSM copytools. The only specific use case for them currently is to enable the Import Bucket feature of Cloud Edition, where the contents of an S3 bucket can be imported when the filesystem is created. This feature can be used to "pre-stage" a filesystem with files e.g. from AWS Public Datasets or other sources. After the import process completes, the files are available in a released state, and the file data is restored upon file access or explicit restore using Lustre HSM facilities. If this feature will not be used, it is safe and recommended to set the Worker instance count to 0 in the template parameters.

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