Hint: I used AWS US-EAST-1 as my default region.

Prerequisites

This automation mechanism requires the following components to be already available.

• Packer
• Terraform
• AWS Cli
• Your AWS account configured:$aws configure, with environment variables set.

How to use it

Prepare the AMI image with Packer

Generate your personal keys (Pub, Priv) if you don't have it already:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "user@domain.lcl" -f ./the-keys

if you have them already place both your keys in the ./packer/ directory and update the file names inside ./packer/image.pkr.hcl

The default region is us-east-1 and IaaS Provider is AWS. If you want another region update them in ./packer/image.pkr.hcl in the region block and ./terraform/variables.tf in the region block.

Execute the following command from inside ./packer/ directory:

packer build image.pkr.hcl

The last line shows the name of new ami ID alongside with its deployment region that can be used for the deployment. Copy it.

Service deployment:

Go to the ami_id variable block of ./terraform/variables.tf and replace your ami ID with the old one.

review ./terraform/variables.tf throughly and update it accordingly, setting the value for Certificate ARN is a must!

then from the directory where main.tf exists execute this command:

terraform init && terraform plan -out=main.plan

if you are happy with what you see then you can execute terraform apply "main.plan" to make the service available.

• hint: If you want to connect to the server for some reason: ssh theuser@$(terraform output -raw public_ip) -i ./packer/the-keys

• hint2: In case you get an error stating that you are using two subnets in the same region, destroy the deployment with terraform destroy and again use terraform plan -out=main.plan and apply it

Once the deployment was successful, go to AWS Route53 and create a A record, set its destination as alias then select Alias to Application and Classic Load Balancer fill the form to your deployment region, you should see a new load balancer ID with the name of lb-sentry mentioned in it. select it and create the record.

Once the record is created give it some few seconds and the navigate to your created address using https://.

• hint: if you don't want to use the service anymore just go to the same directory of ./terraform/ and execute this command: terraform destroy and then type yes