NEW! Spotinst Custom Health Check Service – HCS

Stav Maor
Stav Maor
Product Manager
May 4th, 2016
2 Min read
Amazon Web Services

In order to make a huge step forward with managing complex environments and providing a complete suite for running workloads in AWS – We are delighted to announce our new Health Check service called “Elastigroup HCS”.

Elastigroup has a native support for Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, allowing you to benefit from a complete control over applications that run behind an ELB.

One of the most powerful features offered by the ELB and Autoscaling is the “Health Check”, which enables you to create custom checks to verify your application healthiness on all registered instances in the cluster. However, for environments that are using HAProxy, or running as a part of Amazon ECS cluster, Kubernetes or even Mesos, it is hard to determine what is the real application status and whether a node is making some “noise” and should be scheduled for replacement.

 

 

HIGH LEVEL OVERVIEW

In order to use HCS, you need to install Spotinst HCS to your VPC, and place it in a proper security group that is open to your application.
Spotinst HCS is a docker container that can run on any instance within your AWS deployment.

Screen Shot 2016-05-04 at 21.52.49

 

HOW IT WORKS

  1. Define your HCS in your management console or in your API.
    Here is an Example of an API call to setup a Health Check config.

    { HealthCheck: { HealthyThreshold: 0, Interval: 0, Target: ‘STRING_VALUE’, Timeout: 0, UnhealthyThreshold: 0 }
  2. A designated monitoring service sends health check requests to the HCS. It communicates with your instances and sends back an answer regarding the healthiness of your app and response times.
  3. The data is being stored in Spotinst database and is immediately available in Spotinst management console.
  4. After an instance has been marked unhealthy as a result of a HCS health check, it schedules the instance for replacement.
    Elastigroup creates a scaling activity and launches a new instance to replace the unhealthy instance. Upon a successful health check response from the Spotinst HCS, Elastigroup creates another scaling activity for terminating the unhealthy instance and then terminates it.

 

GETTING STARTED

Follow these steps to configure HCS in your account

  1. Create an Elastigroup
  2. Install the Elastigroup HCS within your VPC
  3. Configure Health Check and associate it with your Elastigroup
  4. Monitor the process through the Spotinst Management Console

 

Best,

The Spotinst Team.