Step 1: Preparing the AWS deployment

This page lists the steps you need to take before deploying Automation Suite to AWS.

Important: To prevent data loss, ensure the infrastructure you use does not automatically delete cluster disks on cluster reboot or shutdown. If this capability is enabled, make sure to disable it.

Getting started on AWS

The AWS deployment requires a moderate level of familiarity with AWS services.

If you are new to AWS, you can start by reading the following introductory materials to get familiar. They provide basic materials for how to design, deploy, and operate infrastructure and applications on the AWS Cloud.

Getting Started Resource Center

AWS Training and Certification

This Quick Start also assumes familiarity with AWS Services listed in the Request resources quotas section of this guide. For a detailed diagram and description of the architecture, see:

Deployment architecture on AWS

Creating an AWS account

If you don’t already have an AWS account, create one by following the step-by-step instructions. Your AWS account is automatically signed up for all AWS services. You are charged only for the services you use.

Configuring your AWS account

The following sections walk you through the steps you need to take to configure your AWS Account specific to the Automation Suite deployment requirements.

Amazon EC2 key pairs

You need at least one EC2 key pair in the AWS account in the Region where you will deploy the Quick Start.

To create a key pair, see Amazon EC2 key pairs and Linux instances.

Take note of the key-pair name as it is needed during the deployment.

Note: For testing or evaluation purposes, we recommend creating a new key pair instead of using an existing one.

Valid domain name

This Quick Start requires you to have established ownership of the parent domain under which the web application will be served. If you want to register a domain, see Registering a public domain.

If you have registered the domain using AWS Route 53, then the hosted zone is preconfigured, and no additional configuration is necessary.

Otherwise, you should set up a hosted zone in your AWS account, with the required name server, start of authority, CNAME, and text records. For further details on how to create a public hosted zone, see Working with public hosted zones.

To use other DNS provider, leave the hosted zone id parameter empty. This pauses the deployment after the load balancer creation, allowing you to manually configure the DNS. To resume the deployment, search for the WaitConditionHandle resource in the routing stack. The Physical Id of this resource is an URL. Execute a POST request as described here.

Request resource quotas

If necessary, request service quota increases for the following resources. You might need to request increases if your existing deployment currently uses these resources and if this Quick Start deployment could result in exceeding the default quotas. The Service Quotas console displays your usage and quotas for some aspects of some services.

For more information, see What is Service Quotas? and AWS service quotas.

Resource	Requirement
VPCs	1
Subnets	Up to 6
NAT gateways	2
VPC endpoints	1
Internet gateways	1
Elastic IP addresses	Up to 6
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) security groups	1
IAM roles	Up to 7
Auto Scaling groups	Up to 2
Application Load Balancers	Either 0 or 1
Network Load Balancers	Either 1 or 2
Public certificate authorities (CA)	1
Hosted zone	1
RDS instances	1
Bastion hosts	1
Secrets	4
Parameters in Parameter Store	3
SSM documents	Either 0 or 3
Lambda Functions	3
Instance Profiles	2
Security Groups	3

Supported AWS regions

In order for the Quick Start to work in a Region other than its default Region, all the services that are part of the deployment must also be supported in that Region.

For an up-to-date list of AWS Regions and the AWS services they support, see AWS Regional Services.

Note: Certain Regions are available on an opt-in basis. For more information, see Managing AWS Regions.

To test whether a specific Region is supported, you can launch Quick Start for that Region and, if you get an Unrecognized resource type error, then Quick Start is not supported in that Region.

IAM permissions

Before launching the Quick Start, you must sign in to the AWS Management Console with IAM permissions for the resources that the templates deploy. The AdministratorAccess managed policy within IAM provides sufficient permissions, although your organization may choose to use a custom policy with more restrictions.

For more information, see AWS managed policies for job functions.

For a complete list of roles and policies that the CloudFormation template creates, see Roles and policies.

Connections to external endpoints

The following table describes all the external endpoints that the service interacts with:

Requirements	Details
AWS metadata service	Provides details about your Amazon EC2 instance
AWS management APIs	Used via AWS CLI or lambda functions
AWS bootstrap archive	Used for services to provision and manage resources. Retrieved from the following URL: https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-examples/aws-cfn-bootstrap-py3-latest.tar.gz
AWS CLI package	Used for the command line interface to interact with AWS services from a machine. You can access the package from the following URL: https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip
AWS SSM Agent	Used for managing instances via remote commands at scale. You can download the agent from the following URL: https://s3.${AWS::Region}.amazonaws.com/amazon-ssm-${AWS::Region}/latest/linux_amd64/amazon-ssm-agent.rpm
AWS Cloudwatch Agent	Used for collecting system and application logs for monitoring. You can download the agent from the following URL: https://s3.amazonaws.com/amazoncloudwatch-agent/redhat/amd64/latest/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.rpm
Nvidia drivers	Required for GPU-enabled VMs. You can get the drivers from the Nvidia repository.
External repository if used	N/A
UiPath S3 buckets for templates / lambda functions usage / bash scripts for installation.	N/A

For more details, see Network requirements.

Connecting AI Center to an external Orchestrator

To connect AI Center to an external Orchestrator, you must set Connect AiCenter to an external Orchestrator to true and provide certificates for Orchestrator and Identity to the parameters listed in AWS deployment parameters. For details on how to obtain the certificates, see Chain certificates.

To encode the certificates in base64 format, run the following commands:

cat orchestrator.cer | base64 | tr -d '\n' > orchestratorCert
cat identity.cer | base64 | tr -d '\n' > identityCert

To register AI Center to the external Orchestrator, you must run this SSM document.

Backing up the cluster

The AWS template allows you to enable a backup at deployment time. By default, the backup interval is set to 90 minutes, and the retention interval is set to 72 hours. You can change the default values post-deployment.