Deploy .NET to AWS

Full Title

Deploying a ASP.NET core website to Amazon Web Services

Context

• Bring up a secure web site deployment with a minimum of fuss.
• At first the challenge is getting the Web Site working well.
• The assumption here is that the design is not fully fleshed out as the User Experience needs to be functional before it can be fully evaluated.
• Later the problem is to get the performance to be good while the deployment expands to multiple instances.

Problems

• The largest part of the problem is not getting the web site to run, but rather to ensure that it is secure using SSL certificates and HTTPS.

Solutions

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was selected as the resource for its ease of deployment and expansion to handle volume.
• Elastic Beanstalk (EB) automates some of the deployment and expansion services for EC2. Creating and Deploying Elastic Beanstalk Applications in .NET Using AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio.
• Terminating HTTPS on Amazon EC2 Instances Running .NET on single instances (not behind a load balancer.)
  • pushing the private key to an S3 bucket.

Debugging

• It is possible to install and run AWS PowerShell tools to see what EC2 instances look like. (An instance is one server running the site.)
  • Setting up the AWS Tools for PowerShell on a Windows-based Computer
  • PS C:\> Import-Module AWSPowerShell
  • PS C:\> Get-AWSPowerShellVersion

• It is also possible to look at EB, but that requires the local computer to enable Python and PIP.
• Windows Remote Desktop can be enabled to see what the EC2 instance really looks like. Clink here for information on Connecting to Your Windows Instance.
  • You will need to have the RDP client installed on Windows, which is common, or on other operating systems, which is uncommon.
  • You need a key pair - using AWS PowerShell these are the instructions for the EC2Key pair cmdlet if you have not already created a pem file for this purpose. You can only retrieve the private key when you create the key pair, so be sure to save the key to a file.
  • You will need to open the port on EC2 for RDP inbound traffic Adding a Rule for Inbound RDP Traffic to a Windows Instance
  • One easy way to start the RDP client is to navigate to the EC2 console, select the instance to be view and click on the "Connect" button at the top. A RDP connection string will be downloaded that you can put in a convenient place, like your desktop.