Quick Start Guide

Environment

• At Netflix, we run Asgard using Oracle JDK 6 on Linux and Mac. Those are our most tested configurations.
• We've seen issues with OpenJDK and Java7 in the past, but believe they should be resolved now.
• There are known issues with Asgard on Windows. There are a couple of suggestions on the Troubleshooting page that might help if you want to try to get Asgard to run in Windows.

Create an AWS key pair

• Ensure there is at least one EC2 SSH key pair in your AWS account.
• Create a key pair using the AWS Management Console.
• See Amazon's documentation for help using the key pair to gain SSH access to your EC2 instances.

Sign up for SQS and SimpleDB (it's free)

• Asgard assumes your AWS account is signed up for multiple cloud services, and may hang when loading caches on startup if one of those services stays unavailable to you. Some users have reported hung startup routines until their account had SQS and SimpleDB.

Download and run Asgard

• These instructions cover running Asgard as a standalone jar file with embedded Tomcat. You can also run Asgard in as a war file inside of Tomcat. See Tomcat Configuration for instructions.

1. Download asgard-standalone.jar from https://github.com/Netflix/asgard/releases
2. Open a shell and navigate to the directory where you downloaded the jar file.
3. Run java -Xmx1024M -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -jar asgard-standalone.jar
4. See Troubleshooting if there is a problem

Provide your AWS account credentials

1. Open a browser and go to http://localhost:8080 (or the port you chose)
2. If the server has never run Asgard before you should see a form requesting your AWS credentials.
   • This is a shortcut for creating a minimal Asgard configuration in a default location on your server. You can modify the configuration file later.
   • If your AWS account already owns Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that you launch, then uncheck "Use public Amazon images" in order to remove clutter from your image lists.
3. Enter your credentials and wait for the server to load and cache data from the AWS. The screen should refresh automatically when loading is complete after a few minutes.

Create an application and security group

1. Click "App"
2. Click "Create New Application"
   • Name: "helloworld"
   • Description: "Example application"
   • Owner: <your name>
   • Email: <your email address>
   • Leave the drop-downs unchanged
3. Submit the form by clicking "Create New Application" at the bottom
4. On the Application Details screen, click "Edit Application Security"
5. Leave the checkboxes empty
6. Submit the form by clicking "Update Security Groups" at the bottom

Create a cluster

1. Click "Cluster"
2. Click "Create New Auto Scaling Group"
3. Select the "helloworld" application
   • Notice the name preview changes
4. Scroll down to the "Launch Configuration" section
5. Change the AMI Image ID to the AMI that you want to deploy as your helloworld example.
6. Select the helloworld security group
7. Submit the form by clicking "Create New Auto Scaling Group" at the bottom