Running InfluxDB on AWS with Cloud Formation

Coding bootcamps are great. I learned a lot, and it enabled me to land a Developer Advocacy role. However, despite an extensive curriculum and excellent instructors, I still came out lacking a lot of basic knowledge. I took a Data Science bootcamp, which meant that I never focused on back-end, and like many bootcamp grads, only ever used Heroku. Creating and running a cloud instance through a major cloud provider was one glaring gap. Today, we will fill that gap by running the Influx 2.0 Docker image on AWS with Cloud Formation. The repo that accompanies this cookbook can be found here.

While my desire to fill a gap in my knowledge motivated me to get InfluxDB running on an EC2 instance, there are more practical advantages to doing so. You can send all of your DevOps monitoring, Application Monitoring, and Amazon CloudWatch metrics to InfluxDB with telegraf. With InfluxDB, you can get real-time views into your AWS spend to cut costs. If you’re looking for an example, I encourage you to read this whitepaper to learn about how Houghton Mifflin Harcourt achieves that.

Setup for an EC2 instance

To get started, you will need to create an AWS account. Next, you will need to generate a key pair and download the private key which will allow you to ssh on to your EC2 instance.