What are cloud best practices for installing software on many EC2 instances that can be configured many ways?

Question

I have a large piece of server software (3 GB of files pre-install) that is running on an EC2. The software installs a full app server or interface server that communicates with the front-end desktop GUIs and database. The software was originally designed years ago to be installed through a visual step-by-step installer off a USB drive on premises. This installer ensures that the software is set up with proper configuration, networking, connection to the database, etc. Every client gets 1 or more EC2 instances dedicated to handle their workload.
Moving into a cloud-minded paradigm, what is a better way to handle creating many servers, for many clients, all with different configurations of this software? When a server goes down, or another is needed for load, what's a "cloud" practice to spin up a new server and install the same configuration of software on this server?

I have multiple ideas including:
1. Store software files in S3 bucket and pull them to the EC2 instances as necessary. A config file for each customer will also be updated and stored on S3. The EC2 will then start the software from a PowerShell script to create proper configurations.
2. Store the software in the AMI of EC2 exactly as configured. This means any time a server is created with a new client configuration, we create a new AMI after installation.
3. Create a Lambda function that can handle all the different configuration parameters. When invoked, it will take care of spinning up a server, moving the software to the server, and installing the software with proper configuration.

Any guidance or references to white papers would be appreciated.

Thank you!

Answer

Hi - You can consider to look into the following. One from an auto scaling standpoint and one from bringing up the infrastructure.

1. A launch template is similar to a launch configuration, in that it specifies instance configuration information. It includes the ID of the Amazon Machine Image (AMI), the instance type, a key pair, security groups, and other parameters used to launch EC2 instances. For example, you can create a launch template that defines a base configuration without an AMI or user data script. After you create your launch template, you can create a new version and add the AMI and user data that has the latest version of your application for testing . More Reference : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/launch-templates.html
2. Deploying applications on Amazon EC2 with AWS CloudFormation - CloudFormation includes a set of helper scripts (cfn-init, cfn-signal, cfn-get-metadata, and cfn-hup) that are based on cloud-init. You call these helper scripts from your CloudFormation templates to install, configure, and update applications on Amazon EC2 instances that are in the same template. Reference : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/deploying.applications.html

With the software you mentioned , yes there would some sort of script or helper to do the configurations for but above ideas may also help.

You can also check Distributor, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, helps you package and publish software to AWS Systems Manager managed nodes. Reference :  https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/distributor.html

What are cloud best practices for installing software on many EC2 instances that can be configured many ways?

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