Build a HA Web on AWS with Terragrunt

By tigonguyen |
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Overview of the AWS infrastructure

In today’s digital landscape, high availability is a critical requirement for web applications to ensure seamless user experiences and minimize downtime. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a robust infrastructure to build highly available web applications, and with the power of Terraform, automating the provisioning of such infrastructure becomes even easier.

In this blog post, we will explore a comprehensive Terraform repository, terraform-aws-ha-webapp, that offers a scalable and fault-tolerant architecture for deploying a highly available web application on AWS. Let’s dive in and see how this repository can help us build resilient web applications.

Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

Terraform is an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that enables you to define and provision infrastructure resources using declarative configuration files. It simplifies the process of managing infrastructure, allowing you to automate the creation, modification, and destruction of resources.

Repository Structure and Components

The terraform-aws-ha-webapp repository follows a well-organized structure that separates different components of the infrastructure. It includes modules for the web application, load balancers, auto scaling groups, databases, and more. This modular approach allows for easy customization and scalability.

Features and Benefits

The repository offers several features and benefits for building a highly available web application:

  • High Availability: The architecture incorporates redundancy and fault tolerance at multiple layers to ensure high availability of the application, even in the face of failures.

  • Auto Scaling: The web application is set up with auto scaling groups, allowing it to automatically scale up or down based on demand, ensuring optimal performance and cost efficiency.

  • Load Balancing: The application is fronted by an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) that distributes incoming traffic across multiple instances, improving performance and enabling seamless handling of traffic spikes.

  • Database Resilience: The repository includes options for setting up highly available databases, such as Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ deployment or Amazon Aurora.

  • Security: The infrastructure incorporates security best practices, such as using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, security groups, and SSL certificates to protect the application and its data.

Getting Started

Prerequisite

Here is some related components to follow my scanerio:

  • Dedicated Vault server (this project used vault.scienista.com).
  • An AWS programable account with following permissions:
    • AmazonRDSFullAccess
    • AmazonEC2FullAccess
    • AmazonElastiCacheFullAccess
    • AmazonS3FullAccess
    • AmazonDynamoDBFullAccess
    • AmazonElasticFileSystemFullAccess

Instructions

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/tigonguyen/terraform-basic-web-app.git
cd terraform-basic-web-app/envs/

Provision S3 andf DynamoDB backend:

cd backend
terraform init
terraform plan --out "tfplan"
terraform apply "tfplan"
cd ../

Provision a new HA web environment via modifying a yaml file:

cp -rf dev uat
cd uat/
sed -i 's/dev/uat/g' env_vars.yaml \
&& sed -i 's+10.0.0.0/16+192.168.0.0/16+g' env_vars.yaml \
&& sed -i 's+10.0.0.0/24+192.168.0.0/24+g' env_vars.yaml \
&& sed -i 's+10.0.1.0/24+192.168.1.0/24+g' env_vars.yaml \
&& sed -i 's+10.0.2.0/24+192.168.2.0/24+g' env_vars.yaml \
&& sed -i 's+10.0.3.0/24+192.168.3.0/24+g' env_vars.yaml \
&& sed -i 's+10.0.5.0/24+192.168.4.0/24+g' env_vars.yaml \
&& sed -i 's+10.0.5.0/24+192.168.5.0/24+g' env_vars.yaml

Provision entire the architecture:

terragrunt run-all apply

Clean up:

terragrunt run-all destroy

Conclusion

The terraform-aws-ha-webapp repository offers a powerful solution for building highly available web applications on AWS using Terraform. With its modular architecture, scalability, and fault tolerance features, you can confidently deploy resilient web applications that provide exceptional user experiences and minimize downtime.

By leveraging the capabilities of Terraform, you can automate the provisioning and management of your infrastructure, enabling faster development cycles and reducing the risk of configuration drift. Give it a try and take your web application deployments to the next level!

Start building your highly available web application with Terraform and the terraform-aws-ha-webapp repository today.

Happy coding!