Amazon Linux on AWS

In this section we walk you through the steps to manually get a basic messaging configuration of the Solace PubSub+ software event broker Docker container up-and-running on an Amazon Linux AMI instance in AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Before you begin

It's assumed you have:

  • An Amazon EC2 account.
  • A stable version of Docker Engine installed.

System Requirements

The number of CPUs and system memory required by your event broker depends on the number of client connections you need to support. By default, fresh installations of the event broker allow up to 100 client connections by default.

The following table lists the minimum number of CPUs, and the minimum value of the total memory that must be provisioned for each connection scaling tier.

Minimum System Resources Required and Recommended For Connection Scaling Tiers

Client Connections CPUs* Required Minimum Recommended Minimum
Virtual Memory (MiB) Virtual Memory (MiB)

Physical Memory (MiB)
up to 100 2 1,903 1,903 930
up to 1,000 2 5,301 5,683 3,748
up to 10,000 4 12,892 13,266 11,321
up to 100,000 8 28,191 28,565 26,620
up to 200,000 12 53,816 53970 52,024

*The monitoring node in a high-availability (HA) group needs only 1 CPU.

The example shown on this page is suitable for use for up to the 1,000 connection scaling tier, and is appropriately configured for testing and PoC activities. If you plan to use your event broker in a production environment, or scale above the 1,000 client connections tier, you should note that there are a number of adjustments that will be need to be made to the example and you should consult the following topics:

  • General information applicable to Solace PubSub+ software event broker Docker container configuration can be found at Topics Unique to Docker Images.
  • Information about setting the client scaling tier can be found at Scaling Tier Deployment Considerations.
  • Information about configuring storage volumes can be found at Storage Configuration.

Step 1: Launch a Host & Install Docker

Use the EC2 Dashboard’s Launch Instance wizard to create an Amazon Machine Image that you can use to run an event broker.

  1. On the main page of the EC2 Dashboard, select the Launch Instance button.

    Create AWS Instance

    Follow the setup wizard, and accept the recommended default settings except as noted in the following steps.

  2. In the Choose AMI step, choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from the AWS Marketplace for the host.
  3. In the Choose an Instance Type step, select an Instance Type based on the connection scaling tier information presented in the System Requirements section.
  4. In the Configure Instance Details step, set Subnet to your availability zone.
  5. In the Add Storage step, set the instance’s storage size and volume type.

    The amount of storage to attach to the instance depends on your application. Both SSD volume types, General Purpose and Provisioned IOPS, are supported.

    For test deployments, a minimum of 30 GB and General Purpose SSD are recommended.

  6. In the Tags step, assign a name to your instance.

    You can add as many tags as required by your application.

  7. At a minimum, it is recommended that the security group include the following inbound rules.
    TypeProtocolPort RangeSource
    Custom TCP RuleTCP80800.0.0.0/0
    Custom TCP RuleTCP555550.0.0.0/0
    SSHTCP220.0.0.0/0

    These port numbers are used for the following services: 22-Host SSH; 8080-SEMP / PubSub+ Manager / SolAdmin; 55555-SMF/non-compressed message data connections. Other ports can be opened as required. For a list of ports associated with event broker services, see Default Configuration for Software Event Brokers.

  8. Once you have completed the launch wizard steps, and have logged into your host, go ahead with installing and configuring Docker. Instructions can be found on the AWS Docker Basics Web page.

  9. You should note that if you are using a t2.medium instance type, a swap file must be created once the host is up-and-running. Follow these instructions:

    sudo mkdir /var/lib/solace
    sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/lib/solace/swap count=2048 bs=1MiB
    sudo mkswap -f /var/lib/solace/swap
    sudo chmod 0600 /var/lib/solace/swap
    sudo swapon -f /var/lib/solace/swap
    sudo grep -q 'solace\/swap' /etc/fstab || sudo sh -c 'echo "/var/lib/solace/swap none swap sw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab'

Step 2: Set Storage-Driver & IPtables

For an upstart based Amazon Linux AMI system, add a line to /etc/sysconfig/docker for setting the iptables and devicemapper Docker daemon options.

For test deployments, it is recommended to set iptables to false and the storage-driver to devicemapper. Docker should be stopped before making this change.

OPTIONS="--iptables=false --storage-driver=devicemapper"

Step 3: Get a Software Event Broker

Pull the event broker image from the Docker repository using these two steps:

  1. Start Docker.

    >sudo service docker start

    You can use the status command to check the status of Docker.

    >sudo service docker status

  2. Pull the image:

    >sudo docker pull solace/solace-pubsub-standard

    :  When loading is finished, you can check the image with the images command.

    >sudo docker images
    REPOSITORY                       TAG         IMAGE ID        CREATED        SIZE
    solace/solace-pubsub-standard    latest      b8a61124d92f    10 days ago    1.11GB

This example assumes that you are using Solace PubSub+ Standard. If you want to use another edition, you need to obtain the appropriate event broker package:

  • Solace PubSub+ Enterprise Evaluation Edition: Go to the Solace Downloads page. Then select Download in the Solace PubSub+ Enterprise Evaluation Edition Docker Images section. You will be able to download a compressed archive file called solace-pubsub-evaluation-<version>-docker.tar.gz.
  • Solace PubSub+ Enterprise: If you have purchased a Docker image of Solace PubSub+ Enterprise, Solace will give you information for how to download the compressed tar archive package from a secure Solace server. Contact Solace Support at support@solace.com if you require assistance.

Once you've obtained the package, start Docker and load the image.

For example:

>sudo docker load -i /tmp/solace-pubsub-evaluation-<version>-docker.tar.gz

Step 4: Set Docker Create Options

There are many options that you can set with the docker create command that is used to build the event broker container. In this example we will show one that sets up a simple configuration suitable for a test deployment that can be used to help you become familiar with Solace PubSub+.

  1. Create a docker-create script.

    >sudo tee /root/docker-create <<-EOF
    #!/bin/bash
    sudo docker create \
    --network=host \
    --uts=host \
    --shm-size=2g \
    --ulimit core=-1 \
    --ulimit memlock=-1 \
    --ulimit nofile=2448:42192 \
    --env 'username_admin_globalaccesslevel=admin' \
    --env 'username_admin_password=admin' \
    --name=solace <repository>:<tag>
    EOF

    For production deployments, there are use-case dependent factors that will impact the option and configuration key settings in the docker create command. For example, the POSIX shared memory size, shm-size and nofile values must be set based on the connection scaling tier. For more information, see Docker Create Options Configuration, Docker Image Specific Topics, and Scaling Tiers for Software Event Brokers.

    In this example, the admin Solace CLI user and an associated password are defined at container creation through the username_admin_globalaccesslevel and username_admin_password configuration keys. By default, in an event broker container, no Solace CLI users are defined, so setting these configuration keys allows the container to be administered through the Solace SolAdmin management tool without first entering the Solace CLI to create an admin user.

    In the above docker create command, the values of <repository> and <tag> are dependent on the event broker Docker image you previously loaded. For example, if you pulled the latest PubSub+ Standard image from Docker, the <repository> is solace/solace-pubsub-standard and the <tag> is latest. If you loaded version 8.10.0.1022 of Solace PubSub+ Evaluation Edition, the value of <repository> is solace-pubsub-evaluation and <tag> is 8.10.0.1022.

  2. Make the docker-create script executable:

    >sudo chmod +x /root/docker-create

Step 5: Create the Container

Create and run the event broker container on your host.

  1. Create the container:

    >sudo /root/docker-create

    Once it’s done running, a long identifier will be displayed that looks something like this:

    1cb8dba3c07b6970b1e22c1067fde76010259e50a8548c3f2f202a6e9ce4e345

    This is the ID for the event broker container you have just created.

  2. Start the event broker:

    >sudo docker start solace

    You can use the docker ps command to check on the status of the event broker once it’s running.

    >sudo docker ps

    The STATUS column associated with the event broker will display if the container is running and for how long.

Next Steps

You now have an event broker container with a basic configuration that is ready for messaging tasks. To get yourself going, you can access either of the Solace management tools PubSub+ Manager or Solace CLI to start issuing configuration or monitoring commands.

To access the Solace PubSub+ Manager:

  1. Open a browser and enter http://<your-event broker's-ip-address>:8080.
  2. Log in as user admin with password admin.

To access the Solace CLI:

  1. Enter the following docker exec command:

    >sudo docker exec -it solace /usr/sw/loads/currentload/bin/cli -A

  2. Type the following commands to enter configuration mode:

    solace> enable

    solace# config

    solace(configure)#

  3. For a list of Solace CLI commands currently supported on the event broker, refer to Software Event Broker CLI Commands.

Also, in order to fully utilize Solace's event broker features, you should familiarize yourself with the configuration operations common to both Solace PubSub+ software event brokers and appliances. For information, see the topics in the Configuration section.