There are at least three different ways to setup a working Kill Bill system on AWS. Two options are based on a single Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing the complete Kill Bill stack, that is both the Kill Bill server and the administrative UI (KAUI). These options are single-tier and multi-tier. The single-tier option is designed to deploy a limited version of Kill Bill quickly for trial and experimentation. For production deployments, we recommend the multi-tier option. A third alternative we offer for deploying a production system is CloudFormation templates. The multi-tier option requires more setup than CloudFormation, but provides more control over the deployment.
Overview
This document describes the single-tier option. Everything you need for this option is bundled in the AMI and can be launched on a single EC2 instance. The components of this system include Kill Bill, KAUI, a database manager (DBM), and a load balancer. The EC2 instance runs Ubuntu Linux. The DBM is an instance of MariaDB, an open source version of MySQL. The load balancer is the open source package Nginx. This package serves as a front end or reverse proxy, distributing the incoming traffic to either Kill Bill or KAUI based on the incoming port.
The organization of the single-tier system looks like this:
In this configuration, Kill Bill and KAUI are deployed within the tomcat application server. Requests are handled by nginx. Requests received on port 443 are delivered to KAUI, and those received on port 8443 are delivered to Kill Bill. Both Kill Bill and KAUI communicate as needed with the mysql databases.
Installation
Login to AWS
To begin, log in to Amazon Web Services at https://aws.amazon.com. If you are new to AWS, you will be asked to create an account and provide billing information. You will need to sign in as a Root User. This should take you to the AWS Management Console, which provides links to all available services.
Check the upper right corner of your screen to be sure you are in the appropriate region. Your EC2 instance will be placed in this region, and may not be accessible from other regions.
Setup your EC2 Instance
1. Subscription
To start the installation process, point your browser to the Kill Bill AMI at AWS Marketplace .
You should see the following image at the top of your screen:
Click Continue to Subscribe. The next page will give the AWS Terms and Conditions. Accept the terms if asked. You will then see a new message confirming that you have subscribed. Next, click Continue to Configuration.
2. EC2 Configuration
The next page will give several configuration options.
Be sure to select the region you plan to operate in. In most cases you should accept the other defaults. Then click Continue to Launch.
The next page will give you several options for the launch method. We recommend that you choose Launch through EC2.
All other options will disappear. Click Launch.
The next page is headed Launch an Instance. Scroll down to the middle of this page, to the box titled Key Pair (login) Here you are asked to choose or create a key pair.