Creating the RDS Database

The Aspera Cluster Manager requires a database. The AMI provided by Aspera has a database and works out of the box, but for deployments where additional resilience is required, Aspera recommends you deploy the Cluster Manager with the Amazon RDS database. This option has the added benefit of an automatic backup and restore. If you configure the Cluster Manager with an RDS database, it automatically backups the Cluster Manager configuration and it is possible to restore the Cluster Manager using that database configuration.

The Cluster Manager initialization process contains logic to auto-configure itself to use a remote database if the required configuration information is available on system initialization. The required database configuration information can be passed to the AMI during the launch process via the User Data fields. The same initialization process can be used to restore an AMI to connect and use an existing MySQL database. For more details on restoring the Cluster Manager, see Launching the Aspera Transfer Cluster Manager.

  1. Go to RDS and click Launch a DB Instance.
  2. Select the MySQL instance.
  3. Select the most current MySQL version.
  4. Select an instance class. The Cluster Manager requires at minimum a db.m3.large image type. Launch your RDS service here as well.
    Tip: Consider a larger database if you plan on running multiple clusters or high volumes of file transfers.
  5. Enter a database size. Database size requirements vary depending on the number of clusters and transfers.
    Tip: Aspera recommends a minimum of 10 GB for basic testing and a minimum of 100 GB for production use.
  6. Enter a username for the database.
    Tip: Aspera recommends a common name, such as "root".
  7. Enter and confirm a secure password for the database.
    Important: Do not use special characters when creating a password. Cluster Manager truncates special characters when authenticating to RDS. Special characters include:
     < > ; ( ) & # ! ^
  8. Specify that you are launching in a VPC. Select or create a security group with TCP port 3306 open.
  9. Click Review and Launch, then click Launch.
    Important: Do not create a database name. The Cluster Manager automatically creates database names for you.