info: To determine the technical writer assigned to the Stage/Group associated with this page, see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/technical-writing/#assignments
For organizations with 1,000 users or less, the recommended AWS installation method is to launch an EC2 single box [Omnibus Installation](https://about.gitlab.com/install/) and implement a snapshot strategy for backing up the data. See the [1,000 user reference architecture](../../administration/reference_architectures/1k_users.md) for more.
For the most part, we'll make use of Omnibus GitLab in our setup, but we'll also leverage native AWS services. Instead of using the Omnibus bundled PostgreSQL and Redis, we will use AWS RDS and ElastiCache.
- An SSL/TLS certificate to secure your domain. If you do not already own one, you can provision a free public SSL/TLS certificate through [AWS Certificate Manager](https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/)(ACM) for use with the [Elastic Load Balancer](#load-balancer) we'll create.
As we'll be using [Amazon S3 object storage](#amazon-s3-object-storage), our EC2 instances need to have read, write, and list permissions for our S3 buckets. To avoid embedding AWS keys in our GitLab configuration, we'll make use of an [IAM Role](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_roles.html) to allow our GitLab instance with this access. We'll need to create an IAM policy to attach to our IAM role:
1. Navigate to the IAM dashboard and click on **Policies** in the left menu.
1. Click **Create policy**, select the `JSON` tab, and add a policy. We want to [follow security best practices and grant _least privilege_](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/best-practices.html#grant-least-privilege), giving our role only the permissions needed to perform the required actions.
1. Assuming you prefix the S3 bucket names with `gl-` as shown in the diagram, add the following policy:
We'll start by creating a VPC for our GitLab cloud infrastructure, then
we can create subnets to have public and private instances in at least
two [Availability Zones (AZs)](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-availability-zones.html). Public subnets will require a Route Table keep and an associated
Internet Gateway.
### Creating the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
We'll now create a VPC, a virtual networking environment that you'll control:
Instances deployed in our private subnets need to connect to the internet for updates, but should not be reachable from the public internet. To achieve this, we'll make use of [NAT Gateways](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-nat-gateway.html) deployed in each of our public subnets:
1. Navigate to the VPC dashboard and click on **NAT Gateways** in the left menu bar.
1. Click **Create NAT Gateway** and complete the following:
1.**Subnet**: Select `gitlab-public-10.0.0.0` from the dropdown.
1.**Elastic IP Allocation ID**: Enter an existing Elastic IP or click **Allocate Elastic IP address** to allocate a new IP to your NAT gateway.
1. Add tags if needed.
1. Click **Create NAT Gateway**.
Create a second NAT gateway but this time place it in the second public subnet, `gitlab-public-10.0.2.0`.
We also need to create two private route tables so that instances in each private subnet can reach the internet via the NAT gateway in the corresponding public subnet in the same availability zone.
1. Next, add a new route to each of the private route tables where the destination is `0.0.0.0/0` and the target is one of the NAT gateways we created earlier.
We'll create a load balancer to evenly distribute inbound traffic on ports `80` and `443` across our GitLab application servers. Based the on the [scaling policies](#create-an-auto-scaling-group) we'll create later, instances will be added to or removed from our load balancer as needed. Additionally, the load balance will perform health checks on our instances.
1. In the **Listeners** section, set the following listeners:
- HTTP port 80 for both load balancer and instance protocol and ports
- TCP port 22 for both load balancer and instance protocols and ports
- HTTPS port 443 for load balancer protocol and ports, forwarding to HTTP port 80 on the instance (we will configure GitLab to listen on port 80 [later in the guide](#add-support-for-proxied-ssl))
1. In the **Select Subnets** section, select both public subnets from the list so that the load balancer can route traffic to both availability zones.
1. We'll add a security group for our load balancer to act as a firewall to control what traffic is allowed through. Click **Assign Security Groups** and select **Create a new security group**, give it a name
from anywhere (`0.0.0.0/0, ::/0`). Also allow SSH traffic, select a custom source, and add a single trusted IP address or an IP address range in CIDR notation. This will allow users to perform Git actions over SSH.
1. Click **Configure Security Settings** and set the following:
1. Select an SSL/TLS certificate from ACM or upload a certificate to IAM.
1. Under **Select a Cipher**, pick a predefined security policy from the dropdown. You can see a breakdown of [Predefined SSL Security Policies for Classic Load Balancers](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/classic/elb-security-policy-table.html) in the AWS docs. Check the GitLab codebase for a list of [supported SSL ciphers and protocols](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/9ee7ad433269b37251e0dd5b5e00a0f00d8126b4/lib/support/nginx/gitlab-ssl#L97-99).
On the Route 53 dashboard, click **Hosted zones** in the left navigation bar:
1. Select an existing hosted zone or, if you do not already have one for your domain, click **Create Hosted Zone**, enter your domain name, and click **Create**.
1. Click **Create Record Set** and provide the following values:
1.**Name:** Use the domain name (the default value) or enter a subdomain.
1. If you registered your domain through Route 53, you're done. If you used a different domain registrar, you need to update your DNS records with your domain registrar. You'll need to:
1. Click on **Hosted zones** and select the domain you added above.
1. You'll see a list of `NS` records. From your domain registrar's admin panel, add each of these as `NS` records to your domain's DNS records. These steps may vary between domain registrars. If you're stuck, Google **"name of your registrar" add dns records** and you should find a help article specific to your domain registrar.
The steps for doing this vary depending on which registrar you use and is beyond the scope of this guide.
We need a security group for our database that will allow inbound traffic from the instances we'll deploy in our `gitlab-loadbalancer-sec-group` later on:
1. From the EC2 dashboard, select **Security Groups** from the left menu bar.
1. Click **Create security group**.
1. Give it a name (we'll use `gitlab-rds-sec-group`), a description, and select the `gitlab-vpc` from the **VPC** dropdown.
1. From the **Availability Zones** dropdown, select the Availability Zones that include the subnets you've configured. In our case, we'll add `eu-west-2a` and `eu-west-2b`.
1. From the **Subnets** dropdown, select the two private subnets (`10.0.1.0/24` and `10.0.3.0/24`) as we defined them in the [subnets section](#subnets).
Avoid using burstable instances (t class instances) for the database as this could lead to performance issues due to CPU credits running out during sustained periods of high load.
1. Select **PostgreSQL** as the database engine and select the minimum PostgreSQL version as defined for your GitLab version in our [database requirements](../../install/requirements.md#postgresql-requirements).
1. Since this is a production server, let's choose **Production** from the **Templates** section.
1. Under **Settings**, set a DB instance identifier, a master username, and a master password. We'll use `gitlab-db-ha`, `gitlab`, and a very secure password respectively. Make a note of these as we'll need them later.
1. For the DB instance size, select **Standard classes** and select an instance size that meets your requirements from the dropdown menu. We'll use a `db.m4.large` instance.
1. Select **Provisioned IOPS (SSD)** from the storage type dropdown menu. Provisioned IOPS (SSD) storage is best suited for this use (though you can choose General Purpose (SSD) to reduce the costs). Read more about it at [Storage for Amazon RDS](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_Storage.html).
1. Under **Availability & durability**, select **Create a standby instance** to have a standby RDS instance provisioned in a different [Availability Zone](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Concepts.MultiAZ.html).
1. Click **Create security group** and fill in the details. Give it a name (we'll use `gitlab-redis-sec-group`),
add a description, and choose the VPC we created previously
1. In the **Inbound rules** section, click **Add rule** and add a **Custom TCP** rule, set port `6379`, and set the "Custom" source as the `gitlab-loadbalancer-sec-group` we created earlier.
Redis cluster. Do not enable **Cluster Mode** as it is [not supported](../../administration/redis/replication_and_failover_external.md#requirements). Even without cluster mode on, you still get the
Since our GitLab instances will be in private subnets, we need a way to connect to these instances via SSH to make configuration changes, perform upgrades, etc. One way of doing this is via a [bastion host](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastion_host), sometimes also referred to as a jump box.
If you do not want to maintain bastion hosts, you can set up [AWS Systems Manager Session Manager](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/session-manager.html) for access to instances. This is beyond the scope of this document.
1. Navigate to the EC2 Dashboard and click on **Launch instance**.
1. Select the **Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS (HVM)** AMI.
1. Choose an instance type. We'll use a `t2.micro` as we'll only use the bastion host to SSH into our other instances.
1. Click **Configure Instance Details**.
1. Under **Network**, select the `gitlab-vpc` from the dropdown menu.
1. Under **Subnet**, select the public subnet we created earlier (`gitlab-public-10.0.0.0`).
1. Double check that under **Auto-assign Public IP** you have **Use subnet setting (Enable)** selected.
1. Leave everything else as default and click **Add Storage**.
1. For storage, we'll leave everything as default and only add an 8GB root volume. We won't store anything on this instance.
1. Click **Add Tags** and on the next screen click **Add Tag**.
1. We’ll only set `Key: Name` and `Value: Bastion Host A`.
1. Click **Configure Security Group**.
1. Select **Create a new security group**, enter a **Security group name** (we'll use `bastion-sec-group`), and add a description.
1. We'll enable SSH access from anywhere (`0.0.0.0/0`). If you want stricter security, specify a single IP address or an IP address range in CIDR notation.
1. Click **Review and Launch**
1. Review all your settings and, if you're happy, click **Launch**.
1. Acknowledge that you have access to an existing key pair or create a new one. Click **Launch Instance**.
Confirm that you can SSH into the instance:
1. On the EC2 Dashboard, click on **Instances** in the left menu.
1. Select **Bastion Host A** from your list of instances.
1. Click **Connect** and follow the connection instructions.
1. If you are able to connect successfully, let's move on to setting up our second bastion host for redundancy.
### Create Bastion Host B
1. Create an EC2 instance following the same steps as above with the following changes:
1. For the **Subnet**, select the second public subnet we created earlier (`gitlab-public-10.0.2.0`).
1. Under the **Add Tags** section, we’ll set `Key: Name` and `Value: Bastion Host B` so that we can easily identify our two instances.
1. For the security group, select the existing `bastion-sec-group` we created above.
### Use SSH Agent Forwarding
EC2 instances running Linux use private key files for SSH authentication. You'll connect to your bastion host using an SSH client and the private key file stored on your client. Since the private key file is not present on the bastion host, you will not be able to connect to your instances in private subnets.
Storing private key files on your bastion host is a bad idea. To get around this, use SSH agent forwarding on your client. See [Securely Connect to Linux Instances Running in a Private Amazon VPC](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/securely-connect-to-linux-instances-running-in-a-private-amazon-vpc/) for a step-by-step guide on how to use SSH agent forwarding.
We will need a preconfigured, custom GitLab AMI to use in our launch configuration later. As a starting point, we will use the official GitLab AMI to create a GitLab instance. Then, we'll add our custom configuration for PostgreSQL, Redis, and Gitaly. If you prefer, instead of using the official GitLab AMI, you can also spin up an EC2 instance of your choosing and [manually install GitLab](https://about.gitlab.com/install/).
1. Click **Launch Instance** and select **Community AMIs** from the left menu.
1. In the search bar, search for `GitLab EE <version>` where `<version>` is the latest version as seen on the [releases page](https://about.gitlab.com/releases/). Select the latest patch release, for example `GitLab EE 12.9.2`.
1. Select an instance type based on your workload. Consult the [hardware requirements](../../install/requirements.md#hardware-requirements) to choose one that fits your needs (at least `c5.xlarge`, which is sufficient to accommodate 100 users).
1. Click **Configure Instance Details**:
1. In the **Network** dropdown, select `gitlab-vpc`, the VPC we created earlier.
Connect to your GitLab instance via **Bastion Host A** using [SSH Agent Forwarding](#use-ssh-agent-forwarding). Once connected, add the following custom configuration:
Since we're adding our SSL certificate at the load balancer, we do not need the GitLab built-in support for Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt [is enabled by default](https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/ssl.html#lets-encrypt-integration) when using an `https` domain in GitLab 10.7 and later, so we need to explicitly disable it:
To find the host or endpoint, navigate to **Amazon RDS > Databases** and click on the database you created earlier. Look for the endpoint under the **Connectivity & security** tab.
Gitaly is a service that provides high-level RPC access to Git repositories.
It should be enabled and configured on a separate EC2 instance in one of the
[private subnets](#subnets) we configured previously.
Let's create an EC2 instance where we'll install Gitaly:
1. From the EC2 dashboard, click **Launch instance**.
1. Choose an AMI. In this example, we'll select the **Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS (HVM), SSD Volume Type**.
1. Choose an instance type. We'll pick a **c5.xlarge**.
1. Click **Configure Instance Details**.
1. In the **Network** dropdown, select `gitlab-vpc`, the VPC we created earlier.
1. In the **Subnet** dropdown, select `gitlab-private-10.0.1.0` from the list of subnets we created earlier.
1. Double check that **Auto-assign Public IP** is set to `Use subnet setting (Disable)`.
1. Click **Add Storage**.
1. Increase the Root volume size to `20 GiB` and change the **Volume Type** to `Provisoned IOPS SSD (io1)`. (This is an arbitrary size. Create a volume big enough for your repository storage requirements.)
1. For **IOPS** set `1000` (20 GiB x 50 IOPS). You can provision up to 50 IOPS per GiB. If you select a larger volume, increase the IOPS accordingly. Workloads where many small files are written in a serialized manner, like `git`, requires performant storage, hence the choice of `Provisoned IOPS SSD (io1)`.
1. Click on **Add Tags** and add your tags. In our case, we'll only set `Key: Name` and `Value: Gitaly`.
1. Click on **Configure Security Group** and let's **Create a new security group**.
1. Give your security group a name and description. We'll use `gitlab-gitaly-sec-group` for both.
1. Create a **Custom TCP** rule and add port `8075` to the **Port Range**. For the **Source**, select the `gitlab-loadbalancer-sec-group`.
1. Also add an inbound rule for SSH from the `bastion-sec-group` so that we can connect using [SSH Agent Forwarding](#use-ssh-agent-forwarding) from the Bastion hosts.
Instead of storing configuration _and_ repository data on the root volume, you can also choose to add an additional EBS volume for repository storage. Follow the same guidance as above. See the [Amazon EBS pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/). We do not recommend using EFS as it may negatively impact the performance of GitLab. You can review the [relevant documentation](../../administration/nfs.md#avoid-using-awss-elastic-file-system-efs) for more details.
Now that we have our EC2 instance ready, follow the [documentation to install GitLab and set up Gitaly on its own server](../../administration/gitaly/index.md#run-gitaly-on-its-own-server). Perform the client setup steps from that document on the [GitLab instance we created](#install-gitlab) above.
As we are terminating SSL at our [load balancer](#load-balancer), follow the steps at [Supporting proxied SSL](https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/nginx.html#supporting-proxied-ssl) to configure this in `/etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb`.
The public SSH keys for users allowed to access GitLab are stored in `/var/opt/gitlab/.ssh/authorized_keys`. Typically we'd use shared storage so that all the instances are able to access this file when a user performs a Git action over SSH. Since we do not have shared storage in our setup, we'll update our configuration to authorize SSH users via indexed lookup in the GitLab database.
Follow the instructions at [Setting up fast lookup via GitLab Shell](../../administration/operations/fast_ssh_key_lookup.md#setting-up-fast-lookup-via-gitlab-shell) to switch from using the `authorized_keys` file to the database.
Ordinarily we would manually copy the contents (primary and public keys) of `/etc/ssh/` on the primary application server to `/etc/ssh` on all secondary servers. This prevents false man-in-the-middle-attack alerts when accessing servers in your cluster behind a load balancer.
We'll automate this by creating static host keys as part of our custom AMI. As these host keys are also rotated every time an EC2 instance boots up, "hard coding" them into our custom AMI serves as a handy workaround.
Since we're not using NFS for shared storage, we will use [Amazon S3](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/) buckets to store backups, artifacts, LFS objects, uploads, merge request diffs, container registry images, and more. Our documentation includes [instructions on how to configure object storage](../../administration/object_storage.md) for each of these data types, and other information about using object storage with GitLab.
Since we are using the [AWS IAM profile](#create-an-iam-role) we created earlier, be sure to omit the AWS access key and secret access key/value pairs when configuring object storage. Instead, use `'use_iam_profile' => true` in your configuration as shown in the object storage documentation linked above.
to eliminate the need for NFS to support GitLab Pages.
---
That concludes the configuration changes for our GitLab instance. Next, we'll create a custom AMI based on this instance to use for our launch configuration and auto scaling group.
Using the domain name you used when setting up [DNS for the load balancer](#configure-dns-for-load-balancer), you should now be able to visit GitLab in your browser. You will be asked to set up a password
for the `root` user which has admin privileges on the GitLab instance. This password will be stored in the database.
When our [auto scaling group](#create-an-auto-scaling-group) spins up new instances, we'll be able to log in with username `root` and the newly created password.
1. Leave the rest as defaults and click **Add Storage**.
1. The root volume is 8GiB by default and should be enough given that we won’t store any data there. Click **Configure Security Group**.
1. Check **Select and existing security group** and select the `gitlab-loadbalancer-sec-group` we created earlier.
1. Click **Review**, review your changes, and click **Create launch configuration**.
1. Acknowledge that you have access to the private key or create a new one. Click **Create launch configuration**.
### Create an auto scaling group
1. As soon as the launch configuration is created, you'll see an option to **Create an Auto Scaling group using this launch configuration**. Click that to start creating the auto scaling group.
1. Enter a **Group name** (we'll use `gitlab-auto-scaling-group`).
1. For **Group size**, enter the number of instances you want to start with (we'll enter `2`).
1. Select the `gitlab-vpc` from the **Network** dropdown.
1. Add both the private [subnets we created earlier](#subnets).
1. Expand the **Advanced Details** section and check the **Receive traffic from one or more load balancers** option.
1. We'll leave our **Health Check Grace Period** as the default `300` seconds. Click **Configure scaling policies**.
1. Check **Use scaling policies to adjust the capacity of this group**.
1. For this group we'll scale between 2 and 4 instances where one instance will be added if CPU
utilization is greater than 60% and one instance is removed if it falls
to less than 45%.
1. Finally, configure notifications and tags as you see fit, review your changes, and create the
auto scaling group.
As the auto scaling group is created, you'll see your new instances spinning up in your EC2 dashboard. You'll also see the new instances added to your load balancer. Once the instances pass the heath check, they are ready to start receiving traffic from the load balancer.
Since our instances are created by the auto scaling group, go back to your instances and terminate the [instance we created manually above](#install-gitlab). We only needed this instance to create our custom AMI.
If your instances are failing the load balancer's health checks, verify that they are returning a status `200` from the health check endpoint we configured earlier. Any other status, including redirects (e.g. status `302`) will cause the health check to fail.
You may have to set a password on the `root` user to prevent automatic redirects on the sign-in endpoint before health checks will pass.
If you see this page when trying to set a password via the web interface, make sure `external_url` in `gitlab.rb` matches the domain you are making a request from, and run `sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure` after making any changes to it.
