IBSNOW: Installation on AWS

IoT Bridge for Snowflake is not quite ready but will be released in early Q2 of 2023.

Prerequisites

Before being able to install and set up IoT Bridge you must have an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. If you do not already have one you can create one here.

Summary

This process covers installing the IoT Bridge for Snowflake AMI into an AWS account as an EC2 instance. For reference, the IoT Bridge for Snowflake Cloud Formation Template used to build the AWS infrastructure is here - ibsnow.yaml. Note this yaml file does not need to be used for anything (and cannot because the AMI references don't exist). It is here purely for reference to show exactly what is done during the cloud formation deployment.

IoT Bridge Installation

Before deploying IoT Bridge you must create create an AWS EC2 key pair which will ultimately allow you to SSH into the EC2 instance that gets created as part of the process. Information on how to create the key pair can be found here. The key pair must be created in the AWS Region that you intend to deploy IoT Bridge into.

IoT Bridge is installed using the AWS Marketplace 1-click procedure. Begin by browsing to this site: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace. Log in using your AWS account credentials. After doing so, you will see something similar to what is shown below.

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In the search bar, type in 'IoT Bridge for Snowflake' and hit enter. This should show the following.

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Then click on IoT Bridge by Cirrus Link. After doing so, you should see the following.

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Click the yellow 'Continue to Subscribe' button near the top of the screen. This will bring up the following page:

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Now click the blue 'Continue to Configuration' button near the top of the screen. Note by doing so you are agreeing to the EULA and associated terms. This will bring up the following screen.

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In the 'Delivery Method' field, select 'CloudFormation Template' as shown below. This will set up the defaults including the 'Cirrus Link IoT Bridge Template' field, the version, and the region. Select your preference for the region as shown below.

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Now click the blue 'Continue to Launch' button in the upper right corner. This will bring up the following screen.

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Finally, click the 'Launch' button shown in the screenshot above. This will bring up the CloudFormation stack creation page shown below. Note the template associated with the IoT Bridge is automatically populated for you. This is also shown below.

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Click 'Next' in the lower right in the screen capture above. This will bring up the stack configuration page shown below.

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Set the following properties for the stack:

• Stack Name
  • This is a friendly name that will allow you to easily identify the stack in your AWS account
• Instance Type
  • The instance size to use for the deployment. Note the size will affect the costs associated with your deployment.
• KeyName
  • This is the EC2 keypair that you created at the beginning of this process. If you missed it, instructions to create it are here.
• SSH Location
  • This is the the IP address or addresses that will be whitelisted to allow SSH access to the EC2 instance. The example '0.0.0.0/0' will allow SSH access from anywhere. This is not recommended for production environments but will allow access from anywhere initially. This can be changed later as well. A more secure option would be to use your IP address. For example, '47.123.53.23/32' would be used if your IP address is '47.123.53.23'.

After setting the properties, click the 'Next' button in the lower right of the Window. This will bring up the following screen.

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Configure anything else that may be required here. Generally, nothing must be set here given that the user you are logged in as has the permissions to create everything that will created as part of the Cloud Formation deployment. Also, the 'Roll back all stack resources' should be selected in case there is a failure in deployment. This will ensure no resources get created and left in place should the any portion of the stack creation fail. After setting any additional configuration here, click the 'Next' button in the lower right corner. This will bring up the review screen as shown below.

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Double check the configuration and finally click 'Create stack' in the bottom right corner of the screen. Note you also must accept the IAM changes that the IoT Bridge Cloud Formation deployment makes to your AWS account. If you agree to this, click the checkbox shown below and then click the 'Create stack' button.

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This will begin the stack deployment. You can check on the progress by clicking both the Events and Resources tab as shown below. Deployment takes a few minutes to complete. When it completes, you should see something similar to what is shown below with all of the resources showing 'CREATE_COMPLETE' for the status.

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Note deployments can fail for multiple reasons included account resource limitations. Below is an example of a failed deployment's resources page. Note the 'DELETE_COMPLETE' state for a subset of all of the resources that should've been created.

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By clicking the 'Events' page we can see more information about what failed as shown below.

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Note the 'Status reason' column on the right. This deployment failed because the AWS account under which it was deployed has reached its limit of Internet Gateways. To resolve the issue for this case, follow these steps:

1. Delete the stack using the 'Delete' button at the top of the stack's page
2. Resolve the limit issue - either free up an Internet Gateway or request additional resources via an AWS support ticket
3. Repeat this procedure to deploy the stack.

After the AWS Infrastructure has been deployed via the AWS Marketplace 1-click procedure, the application must be configured. In order to configure the application you must be able to access the EC2 instance via SSH. Information on accessing the EC2 instance via SSH can be found here. Additional details on the filesystem layout of this EC2 instance can be found here.

IoT Bridge Configuration

For configuration details, please see: Iot Bridge for Snowflake - Configuration

Reference Documentation

The IoT Bridge Quickstart Guide covers end to end setup of IoT Bridge including Edge setup, IB setup, and seeing data in Snowflake.

The IoT Bridge Configuration Reference covers configuration options for the IoT Bridge EC2 instance.