Easily manage your Amazon EC2 resources with Workload Automation

​In our previous blog Why you should manage cloud resources as an integral part of your business workflow, we described the challenge that customers face every day to reduce cloud costs while ensuring the right amount of resources to their business applications. We announced that a new solution pack is available on top of Workload Automation, provided by HCL Products and Platforms, including a set of new plug-ins to manage the provisioning and deprovisioning of virtual machines in the cloud, on as-needed basis. By orchestrating the application workflow and the workflow that manages the entire lifecycle of the virtual machines needed by the applications (including the actions: start, stop, snapshot, etc. …), Workload Automation can increase both business and infrastructure agility.

The solution pack contains: 

• a plug-in for Amazon EC2
• a plug-in for Microsoft Azure
• a plug-in for IBM SoftLayer ​​

This blog wants to show how easy it is using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) plug-in to manage the provisioning and deprovisioning of Amazon virtual resources, on as-needed basis, as an integral part of customer’s business workflow.  

Within the various Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon EC2 provides scalable computing capacity by managing:

• Virtual computing environments, known as instances
• Preconfigured templates for your instances, known as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
• Various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity for your instances, known as instance types
• Multiple physical locations for your resources, known as regions and availability zones

To easily manage your Amazon EC2 resources with Workload Automation, all you need is to define an Amazon EC2 job and run it according to its schedule. Workload Automation takes care of the interaction with Amazon and lets you know when your resources are correctly instantiated. At the same time, you can bring Amazon computational resources into your application processing quickly. That’s it, simple and powerful! You no longer need to integrate complex external APIs into your working system, increasing costs of maintenance and support, because Workload Automation does it for you!

​Let’s see how it works in a few simple steps.

​The first thing you need to do is to log in to the Workload Automation web user interface: the Dynamic Workload Console. From the Workload Designer, choose to create a new job definition. In the Cloud section, select Amazon EC2 job type.
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​​The job definition’s panel is displayed and you can start defining your job. For additional information, see the Amazon EC2 plug-in documentation at the following link: HWA Solutions.

​Setting up a connection with Amazon

​In the Connection tab, provide your Amazon credentials to let Workload Automation interact with AWS and click Test Connection. A confirmation message is displayed when the connection is established.

Configuring the action ​

In the Manage Existing Instance and Create New Instance tabs you can configure the action that you want to run.
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The Manage Existing Instance tab gives you the possibility to Change the power state of an existing instance, by running stop, start, and reboot actions, Create Amazon Machine Image (AMI) starting from an existing Instance, or Removing an existing instance.
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​The Create New Instance tab helps you creating and launching a new instance for the first time, by specifying instance attributes such as Amazon Machine Image (AMI), Instance Type, Network, Subnet and Security Group. The Select buttons help you filling the fields properly by retrieving the available AWS values.

​Fill in all the required fields in the tab you have selected. When you are ready, save your job by clicking the Save button in the top-left corner of the job definition panel. A confirmation message is displayed and you can now submit the job.

Submitting your job ​

It’s time to Submit your job into the current plan. You can add your job to the job stream that automates your business process flow. Select the action menu in the top-left corner of the job definition panel and click on Submit Job into Current Plan. A confirmation message is displayed and you can switch to the Monitoring view to see what’s going on.

​In the Monitoring view of the Dynamic Workload Console,  the Successful status is displayed when the job completes successfully.

​On the AWS Console, the final Instance State demonstrates that the action was executed properly.

​ (Here we show that the Stop Action of an Existing Instance has been completed as expected)
 
Basing on the actions that you want to run, you can add one or more Amazon EC2 jobs in the job stream that automates your business process flow. In this way, you gain a flexible and dynamic allocation of cloud resources to your workload.
 
If you want to know more about HCL Products and Platforms Solution Pack and the Amazon EC2 plug-in, contact:  Gerald Sood Jerry.sood@hcl.com for US, or FRANCESCA CURZI francesca.curzi@hcl.com for EMEA. If you have any feedback about this article, contact Gianluca Squarcia gianluca.squarcia@hcl.com.
 
*Workload Automation is available as IBM Workload Scheduler and Automation offerings, and HCL Workload Automation.

 Gianluca Squarcia
 Software Engineer at HCL

Author Bio: Hi! I'm Gianluca and thanks for reading my blog. I'm       working as a Software Engineer for HCL Technologies in Rome since November 2016. I am part of the back-end development team. I am currently involved in several HCL innovation projects to extend Workload Automation's functionalities. There are plenty of ways to reach me on this page if you’re interested in Workload Automation or want to collaborate. Email me at gianluca.squarcia@hcl.com.

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