Deploying in the Cloud

To help you get going with deploying MarkLogic on Amazon Web Services (AWS), MarkLogic provides prebuilt Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and ready for deployment CloudFormation Templates. The templates, which build on the AMIs, can be used to provision a MarkLogic Managed Cluster.

CloudFormation Templates

The best (and easiest) way to provision MarkLogic Managed Clusters is via Cloud Formation templates. Managed cluster provides the benefits of high-availability and scalability.

The templates serve both as Getting Started points as well as examples. Once you are comfortable with them, we encourage and expect you to copy and modify them to suit your specific needs. See our GitHub page to download and access the template.

NOTE: Successful launching of EC2 instances via a CloudFormation template requires acceptance of the License Agreement for the underlying AMI. Please visit the corresponding AWS Marketplace AMI page to accept the License Agreement before attempting to launch a stack from any of the templates.

For more information on how to deploy MarkLogic on EC2, please refer to the product documentation.

MarkLogic CloudFormation templates

If you choose to launch the MarkLogic AMIs outside of the Cloud Formation templates, you will not have automatic access to the Managed Cluster features. (You can still gain access to those features via your own custom configuration and automation and the documented series of environment variables and the mlcmd utility.)

For these reasons, we highly recommend starting with the CloudFormation templates, even if you plan to start with a single-node cluster.

MarkLogic AMIs

MarkLogic provides two AMI series, Developer and Essential Enterprise.

The Developer AMI is suited for a variety of purposes, from development to proof-of-concept work. Production use (or any use allowed by the terms of your license) of this AMI may also be supported if you bring your own license (BYOL). After you start up this AMI, you must request and install a free developer license key OR install your own pre-paid license key.

The Essential Enterprise AMI is available for purchase by the hour and comes with a pre-packaged MarkLogic Essential Enterprise license key.

Custom AMIs can also be created using the MarkLogic installers, if preferred or necessary for your requirements. Note that provisioning the MarkLogic AMI by themselves does not automatically provide Managed Cluster features.

MarkLogic 11, 10 and MarkLogic 9 AMIs

Here are the AWS Marketplace pages for the MarkLogic 11, 10 and 9 AMIs:

Launching an AMI with EC2 Console

To gain the benefits of high-availability and scalability, the best practice is to provision is via CloudFormation templates and run MarkLogic as a cluster (see above). However, if you prefer to launch an AMI directly, here are the steps:

1. Create yourself an Amazon account and sign up for Amazon Web Services. (You may need to provide personal details, verification, credit card information and the like).
2. Browse to the AWS Marketplace, search for marklogic, choose an AMI (or choose one of the Marketplace links from this page), select a region, and accept the terms.
3. Launch the AMI with the EC2 Console:
   • Choose a supported instance type (NB: MarkLogic AMIs will not run on micro instances).
   • The AMI is configured to store MarkLogic configuration and data on an attached EBS storage. When you launch this AMI via the EC2 Console, the storage will be pre-configured and it must remain on /dev/sdf device. You can change the default volume size during setup. Leave off the Delete-on-termination checkbox, to enable you to keep your data.
   • Use a Security Group that will open ports 7997-8100. (If you don’t have such a group, you can create one directly in the EC2 Console UI).
   • Proceed to start your instance.
4. When your instance is started, you can browse to the Admin UI on your host’s port 8001. Log in with user “admin”; the password is set to the value of the instance ID.

Support

Community-based support is available by asking questions on Stack Overflow. Beyond that, please also see the Developer Support Program we offer.

GitHub

You can access our CloudFormation templates at our AWS GitHub page. Please feel free to download and modify the template as per your needs.

MarkLogic on aws repository ›

Notes

* Any distribution or sale of custom AMIs with MarkLogic installed is subject to MarkLogic License Agreement terms.

* If you are using Cloud Formation Templates published prior to MarkLogic 9.0-5 Release, you cannot upgrade automatically to 9.0-5 Cloud Formation Templates with VPC Support.

* Please refer to this knowledge base article if you want to upgrade to 1-click compatible MarkLogic AMI from a previously released MarkLogic AMI without pre-configured data volume (device on /dev/sdf).

* Since AWS retired the Classic Load Balancer (CLB) as of August 15, 2022, the CLB feature has been removed from the MarkLogic CloudFormation templates starting with these MarkLogic Server versions:

• 9.0-13.8
• 10.0-9.2

  Starting with those versions, the MarkLogic CloudFormation templates now work like this:

• For single-zone deployments, the CloudFormation template does not create a load balancer. Instead, it replaces the URL in the outputs of the CloudFormation stack with a private DNS name, which you can use to access the MarkLogic cluster.
• For three-zone deployments, the CloudFormation template creates an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Because this ALB runs at OSI layer 7, you cannot use an ODBC connection with business intelligence (BI) tools. Instead, you must create a separate Network Load Balancer.

* Starting with MarkLogic 11.1.0, the MarkLogic CloudFormation Templates replace the use of Launch Configurations with Launch Templates. This ensures that MarkLogic CFT users can make use of all of the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling features now available in Launch Templates.

* Additionally, MarkLogic 11.1.0 adds support for IMDSv2. The IMDSv2 option is set to “required” by default in the 11.1.0 and later CFTs. In order to use MarkLogic Server AMIs before 11.1.0 with the new templates, the templates need to be modified to set IMDSv2 to “optional” as IMDSv2 is not supported in earlier versions of the MarkLogic AMI.