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EC2 Setup

The lab demonstrates the deployment of an isolated, multi-region compute matrix consisting of three standalone EC2 Instances across independent global AWS regions (Frankfurt, N.Virginia and Singapore). To simulate regional load aggregation, an internet-facing Application Load Balancer (ALB) is provisioned locally in Frankfurt (eu-central-1) to intercept public traffic and reverse-proxy request down to a managed local compute target group.

Key Takeaways​

The Global Infrastructure Layout​

By executing these sequential launch wizards, Stephane construct a geo-distributed topology that tracks its own regional runtime metadata:

[ Global Client Request Plane ]
 ├─── Traffic hitting Frankfurt   ───> [ ALB (eu-central-1) ] ───> [ EC2 Instance (AZ: b) ]
 ├─── Traffic hitting N. Virginia ────────────────────────────────> [ EC2 Instance (AZ: a) ]
 └─── Traffic hitting Singapore   ────────────────────────────────> [ EC2 Instance (AZ: b) ]
  • The Security Profile Matrix: The newly generated security groups across all three regions implement matching, wide-open firewall perimeters. They allow inbound administrative access on Port 22 (SSH) alongside open web server delivery capabilities on Port 80 (HTTP) from anywhere (0.0.0.0/0).
  • The Load Balancer Intersect: The Application Load Balancer in Frankfurt is configured across three local AZs to ensure high availability. It routes queries to a custom TG (demo-tg-route-53) on Port 80, which continuously evaluates the operational status of the local Frankfurt EC2 node.

Dynamic User Data & The Metadata Loop​

Stephane passes a shell script in to the EC2 User Data fields at lunch to convert the plain linux machine into active web server running Apace (httpd).

What makes this script special is its ability to scrape the instance's own runtime coordinate. Under the hood, the script call the internal link-local address pool to dynamically inject the machine's active AZ into the index page.

# How the script fetches the live AZ under the hood
curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone

When you hit the public IPs or the ALB's DNS name, the browser prints distinct strings like:

  • hello world from AZ eu-central-1b for Frankfurt
  • hello world from AZ us-east-1a for N. Virginia
  • hello world from AZ ap-southeast-1b for Singapore