Akka EC2

A sample application which demonstrates how to run an auto-scaling cluster in Amazon EC2, including code for discovery of sibling nodes at startup time.

There is an explanation of the approach taken in this blog post.

Build

You'll need SBT installed for this to work. Checkout the code, fire up a terminal in the project's root directory and build it:

sbt clean assembly

This builds a jar containing all the dependencies needed.

Local usage

To test locally, try starting a few instances in separate tabs like this:

java -jar -Dakka.port=2551 target/scala-2.10/akka-ec2.jar
java -jar -Dakka.port=2552 target/scala-2.10/akka-ec2.jar
java -jar -Dakka.port=2553 target/scala-2.10/akka-ec2.jar
java -jar -Dakka.port=2554 target/scala-2.10/akka-ec2.jar

Note that the first instance you start locally must be run on port 2551. You should see some output that the nodes are talking to each other.

Usage on EC2

Ensure in your security group settings that port 2551 is open for both ingress and egress. On each instance, you want to start up the application like this:

java -jar akka-ec2.jar

The node should look for other instances running in the same autoscaling group, and use them to join the cluster. If it is the first instance to start up, then it will form a new cluster.

Note that if you start two or more instances at the same time then you run the risk of splitting the cluster.