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Why this approach?

At Panintelligence, we believe in scripting as much as we possibility can and lean heavily on the community to supply us with open source tooling to facilitate this goal. Hashicorp has long been one of the biggest players in the devops scene and they Infrastructure as code tool “Terraform” offers an idempotent and platform agnostic method to deliver change across an estate. The software is light and portable. Since we already had a great many of the scripts written in terraform to deploy our software in an idempotent manner, it seemed appropriate to share these scripts with partners.

The architecture is driven chiefly by ECS within the deployment in AWS. ECS represents a free way to orchestrate and manage fleets of containers. Backed by fargate, it offers a low complexity method to create a compute layer. There are other container management options available such as kubernetes and docker swarm where we can assist with the installation of our software onto these platforms, but for AWS, nothing pleases a Yorkshireman more than the prospect of a freebie!

We encourage our partners to fork our code and change it for their own purposes, but we make one request. if you stumble across something that’s not quite right, please do raise a merge request with a fix for our base code as you would be helping out a great number of people, and we treasure our community.

Installation of Key Tools

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We host the container images for panintelligence at github container registry (GHCR). In order to access our images, please create a support request with our team at support@panintelligence.com providing your github username or email. The team will respond with a list of images to which you have been granted access.

It’s highly recommended and endorsed that you pull our images and push to your own private image repository so you can maintain service continuity without relying on a third party.

Terraform

Please review the documentation provided by Hashicorp for the most comprehensive and up to date documentation pertaining to installation of Terraform on your chosen platform https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/tutorials/aws-get-started/install-cli

AWS

You will need a target AWS account with the scope to provision resources defined in the service quotas explained later in this document.

System Architecture

Diagram

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it’s recommended to leave around 1Gb storage for images, themes, “SVG” files, custom JDBC and locale information. This will flex based on your own requirements and is dependent on the size of the images you use. Since Pi is a web-based system, it’s recommended that you compress images to the smallest storage requirements while maintaining image quality to facilitate transfer speeds.

Security

Panintelligence

Public Access

The dashboard container is accessible through port 443 via the load balancer.

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Private Access

There is no direct access expressly added to the repository database. access to the database can be conducted via adminer. If

AWS RDS MariaDb

AWS EFS

EFS is encrypted at rest.

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There is one lambda function that configures the EFS. This lambda function only has access to the EFS volume and MUST only be executed once. repeated execution of this lamdba function will overwrite resources in the EFS, eliminating all changes.

Multi AZ deployment

Auto-scaling deployment

The dashboard autoscaling is set initially for a min and max capacity of 1. This should be set higher should you wish to enable autoscaling. the policy is set to scale based on a CPU exhaustion.

because the dashboard container runs using tomcat, you should not set the autoscaling rules to use memory as this would cause the dashboard to prematurely scale out, and never back in.

Persistent Storage on AWS EFS

Database Respository (metadata) on AWS RDS

Panintelligence

Obtaining a licence key

To obtain your licence, please contact your CSM at panintelligence. If you’re unaware who your CSM is, please contact the support desk support@panintelligence.com and your request will be appropriately routed.

Automated Licence Manager

those looking to authenticate their product using the ALM must place the customer key against the PI_LICENCE environment variable on the dashboard service. This service must have the capability to talk out to the internet. when the dashboard first starts, the process will reach out to our system and obtain the licence pertaining to your customer ID. In the event of an unsuccessful initial callback, you will receive a invalid licence notification.

Offline Licencing

Customers who are unable to provision a system that has egress access to the internet from the application layer may be delivered an offline licence. This licence contains everything required to fully licence panintelligence. This licence is non transferrable. A new licence for each deployment should be sought from your CSM. The licence should be stripped of all carriage returns and line spacing and placed inline in the PI_LICENCE environment variable. Please note that these licences are time limited and thus represents and operational overhead to ensure the licences are kept up to date. Also these licences are of fixed scope. If you require more users or additional modules, you will contact your CSM who can create you a new licence.

Key Skills

• Terraform

• AWS VPC (security groups, networking, subnets, nacls, route tables)

• AWS Lambda

• AWS ECS

• Containerisation

• MySQL

• AWS EFS

• AWS Cloudwatch

• AWS Load Balancing (Application Load Balancing)

• AWS IAM

• AWS Route53

• AWS Secrets Manager

• SSL/TLS Certificates

• Horizontal Scaling

• Linux

Key Run Information

Terraform

Although the terraform scripts are self documenting, it helps to become familiar with the HCL notation that hashicorp uses when provisioning systems with terraform. You can find excellent documentation for your first steps into terraform by following the link: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/intro

Networking and security groups

The panintelligence deployment detailed in the terraform scripts makes use of VPC, subnets, security groups and other AWS assets in order to build out a scalable deployment of panintelligence. The code is reuseable and parameterisable. You’re encouraged to fork from our project. We also welcome contributions from our community for improvements to our scripts.

Backup and Restore

Database Disaster Recovery

by default, the database retention period is 3 days. Should you need to restore from a backup, you should follow the AWS backup restore process https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-backup/latest/devguide/restoring-rds.html

Please note that this will restore to an entire new database. you will need to connect to this database using an administration tool, migrate your backed up database, then issue a restoration.

one approach to this is to launch an interactive container or ec2 instance with mutual access to both databases. install a mariadb client, then follow the following steps to extract and import your database

backup extract (source database)

mysqldump \
--add-drop-table \
--add-drop-database \
--databases \
-u<admin_user> \
-p<your password> \
-h<database source host endpoint> \
-P3306 \
dashboard \ 
--ignore-table=dashboard.mis_user_cat_access_view_pi \
--ignore-table=dashboard.test_user_access \
--ignore-table=dashboard.mis_user_cat_access_view \
> sqldump_dashboard<todays_date>.sql

backup restore (target database)

 mysql \
-u<db_user> \
-p<your password> \
-h<database target host endpoint>  \
-P3306 < sqldump_dashboard<todays_date>.sql

AWS EFS Disaster Recovery

EFS is backed up using EFS backup vault. please follow the AWS instructions to effect a restore

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-backup/latest/devguide/restoring-efs.html

Time To Deploy / Restore

The script takes approximately 20 minutes to run.

Restoring a database using the delta backup routine from aws takes approximately 20 minutes with additional time required to move relevant extracts around. If you have access set up, the whole process should take no longer than 30 minutes.

Healthchecks, Logging, Troubleshooting

How to check if your Panintelligence dashboard is healthy? How can you troubleshoot if there are issues?

Target Groups

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Target groups:

• Log into AWS Management console → Go into EC2 console → On the left side, click into the ‘Target Groups’ tab

• Click into the Panintelligence Target:

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• The image below shows where to check for any unhealthy targets

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• If you do see any unhealthy targets, you can check the ‘Monitoring’ tab to look at the metrics for more details at a specific time

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AWS Cloudwatch

Accessing your instance for administration

Because of the nature of containerisation, changes to the container should not be performed interactively or directly. You can set most settings using environment variables for which there is a comprehensive list available here.

You are welcome to make changes to the base container by means of a Dockerfile if you wish to add additional software or packages. Please note that changes made to the base container will fall outside of support. having said that, we’re only too happy to help if you have found an issue. You can obtain assistance by reaching out to our support team at support@panintelligence.com

AWS RDS MariaDB to check

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Cost Estimates

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if the Panintelligence Repo is healthy:

• AWS RDS MariaDB: To view the logs, please follow these instructions linked here:

• Log into AWS Management console → Go into AWS RDS console → Click into ‘Databases’ → Click into ‘dashboard’:

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• You can check the ‘Monitoring’ tab. This is to see if you are hitting max connections, the CPU Utilisation and memory space :

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• You can even go further and check the RDS MariaDB Logs, select the logs near the bottom and select ‘View’ as highlighted below:

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Cost Estimates

• All costs are in USD unless otherwise stated.

• All Services are deployed to the default region of EU-WEST-1 unless otherwise stated.

Cost Summary

Estimated Montly hosting cost (without licence) $350.15

Cost over 12 Months $4201.80

Please be informed that certain services (e.g., adminer, a database administration tool) and modules that are not utilized in accordance with the terms of your Panintelligence license do not require deployment. This situation presents an opportunity for cost savings.

How to Obtain Support assistance

Our team are on hand during UK office hours and can be raised by emailing support@panintelligence.com

If you require assistance with Panintelligence to help with visualisations, it may be advantageous for you to book time with one of our consultants. Please reach out to your CSM who will schedule this with you. They can be raised at csm@panintelligence.com