Incredibuild Cloud's AWS Deployment Guide

This guide contains information about deploying Incredibuild over AWS, pertaining specifically for the AWS setup.

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1. About Incredibuild Cloud.

Incredibuild Cloud enables you to use AWS EC2 to infinitely increase the number of cores you can use for executing tasks, without needing to install in advance any Helper Agent on on-premises or cloud machine or launch and maintain any cloud resource. To use Incredibuild Cloud, all you need is the basic package of Incredibuild and an active cloud account. Incredibuild Cloud automatically launches and terminates EC2s on the cloud according to your on-going needs. This solution not only accelerates your development cycles, but also saves you major cloud resource costs, which are otherwise incurred for running your tasks over a cloud environment. Each cloud-provisioned machine, which is part of the Incredibuild cloud pool is created within the customer own account and runs an Incredibuild agent, which acts as a Helper. Tasks spawned as part of job execution by an initiator may be distributed by Incredibuild across the various idle CPU’s on Agents available as part of the Incredibuild pool, on-premise or in the cloud. Incredibuild Cloud will spawn and expand the Cloud pool as necessary and within defined limits. To learn more about the benefits of using Incredibuild cloud on AWS, visit our web site.

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2. Prerequisites and requirements

• Time: Around an hour.
• Product license: Incredibuild Cloud’s license is a “Bring your own license” (BYOL). Please contact us directly to order a license at sales@incredibuild.com.
• AWS account: You must have an AWS account set-up. If you don’t, we recommend that you visit the following site: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Entity: Create an IAM user or role. Your IAM user should follow our guide’s instructions as far as the role ARN, external ID and login credentials. If you do not want to login with a user who has an Administrator Access policy, you will need to provide several login details during Incredibuild Cloud’s activation. These login details are included in a new customized role you have to create for this procedure. Read more
• Knowledge Requirements: Knowledge of the following AWS services is required: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Individuals possessing the AWS Associate Certifications should have a sufficient depth of knowledge to deploy the resources specified in this guide.
• AWS Regions: All AWS regions are supported except GovCloud regions.

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3. Architecture

Incredibuild Cloud can be deployed in multiple modes and setups, depending on your deployment strategy. The general deployment architecture is as follows: Here are a few examples of how Incredibuild users have chosen to deploy on AWS:

• Setup within a single availability zone, using a mix of EC2 instance types
• Using Incredibuild Cloud to support employees working from home (WFH) over multiple regions and at multiple build farms
• Multi-AZ Fault Tolerant Architecture. In the multi-AZ fault tolerant deployment option, helpers are situated across multiple availability zones to ensure high availability and fault tolerance.
• Single AZ Architecture (Development and Testing). Incredibuild Cloud  may also be deployed in a single availability zone. The data flow and architecture components are the same as the ones highlighted above.

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Deployment

The onboarding process is in fact part of the user’s registration to the Incredibuild Cloud service. Completion of this step should create all resources that will grant Incredibuild Cloud service permissions to create the resources on behalf of the customer under a selected subscription. The permissions needed include: network, storage, EC2 instances, security, billing etc. To activate Incredibuild Cloud and deploy the coordinator and helpers over AWS please refer to this guide.

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4. Security

In this section, we discuss Incredibuild Cloud’s default configuration deployed pursuant to this guide, AWS general best practices, and options for securing your solution on AWS.

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Communication between the coordinator and the helper machines

Incredibuild uses the TLS 1.2 cryptographic protocol, through the usage of the OpenSSL library. The cipher used by default is decided during negotiation by the TLS infrastructure, depending on which ciphers are supported on both sides of the communication link. In our case, one of the AES suites of ciphers is used. The following diagram demonstrates the flow for any API authentication from coordinator located on Customer’s LAN to Incredibuild Cloud service located in Incredibuild Cloud environment as well as the authentication flow from IB cloud service to the Customer’s cloud to perform provisioning actions.

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Logging

We recommend turning logging on during the initial testing as well as when troubleshooting. However, since logging has an impact on performance, it is not recommended to be activated during production use. Read our guide for instructions

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5. Costs

Since Incredibuild has both cloud and on-prem components running under a BYOL model (bring your own licenses), costs are associated with Incredibuild’s pricing, which may change from time to time. For more information, please refer to our website.

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6. Sizing

Incredibuild’s auto-scaling allows companies to define the instance types and deployment sizing according to the workload demands. We strongly recommend running Incredibuild on a test environment first to assess the desired sizing prior to deployment.

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7. Deployment Assets

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Deployment Options

Incredibuild Cloud can be deployed as a hybrid setup to burst to cloud when on-prem resources are insufficient, or as a pure cloud on AWS. The latter can be deployed across one or more availability zones, using both spot and on-demand instance types.

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Deployment Assets (Recommended For Production)

Incredibuild Cloud deployment is being orchestrated by the coordinator machine. No AWS assets are needed aside from the EC2 machines and anything else which may be required by your company’s policy (eg VPN).

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8. Backup and Recovery

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Instance Failure

Unhealthy instances are detected and terminated by the Incredibuild coordinator. Temporary performance degradation may occur, however users will not experience any data loss and no admin intervention is required. If you encounter persistently unhealthy instances, please contact our support at support@incredibuild.com.

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Coordinator machine redundancy

Incredibuild Cloud offers an automated redundancy for the coordinator machine which automatically gets activated upon coordinator failure. Once the backup machine has been set up, follow Incredibuild Cloud configuration instructions to define the backup machine for automated redundancy.

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Helper machine redundancy

Incredibuild Cloud allows setting up an automated helper machine redundancy which follows a set of fallback instructions across multiple spot instance types and on-demand machines. As a result, any failure to allocate a certain machine type as a helper, will automatically fall back to the next machine type as configured by the user.

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9. Support

For troubleshooting issues, see IncrediBuild Cloud Troubleshooting. For information about our support tiers and SLAs, see the Incredibuild Customer Service Level Agreement. For further help, contact us via the support portal, or at support@incredibuild.com.