1. (Optional) Automatically join to the Anka Build Cloud Controller using User Data:
This step requires that you first set up the Anka Build Cloud.
IMPORTANT: Amazon confirmed that Terminating from the AWS console/API does not properly send SIGTERMs to services and wait for them to stop. This prevents our cloud-connect script from automatically disjoining with ankacluster disjoin before AWS pulls the plug. Therefore, we recommend executing the sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.veertu.aws-ec2-mac-amis.cloud-connect.plist command before termination of the instance.

User Data ENVs

For user-data, don’t use ;, && or any other type of separator between envs.
If you pass in user-data with the exports all on one line, and have non ANKA_ ENVs you’re setting, the cloud-connect.bash service we run on instance start/boot will source/execute them. We recommend you split exports and user-data onto separate lines to avoid this.

ANKA_CONTROLLER_ADDRESS

Full URL for the Anka Build Cloud Controller.

  • REQUIRED
  • Must be in the following structure: http[s]://[IP/DOMAIN]:[PORT].
ANKA_JOIN_ARGS

Allows you to pass in any “Flags” from ankacluster join --help.

  • Optional
ANKA_REGISTRY_OVERRIDE_IP + ANKA_REGISTRY_OVERRIDE_DOMAIN

Allows you to set the registry IP address and domain in the /etc/hosts file.

  • Optional
  • Use 1: if your corporate registry doesn’t have a public domain name, but does have a public IP.
  • Use 2: if you want the EC2 mac mini to pull from a second registry that’s hosted on EC2 instead of a local corporate one (AWS -> AWS is much faster).
ANKA_LICENSE

If not already licensed, the cloud-connect service will license Anka using this ENV’s value.

  • Optional
  • Only used with Community AMI.
  • Only available in >= 2.5.4 AMIs.
  • You can also update invalid/expired licenses with this (requires a reboot).
  • Starting in AMIs with a macOS version greater than 12.2.1: The Fulfillment ID output from anka license activate, which is used for releasing cores, is logged to your Cloud Controller > Logs section in the “AWS Cloud Connect Service”.
ANKA_USE_PUBLIC_IP

This will determine whether the instance/node is joined using the public ipv4. Otherwise, it will default to the local/private ipv4.

  • Optional

Manual Preparation

By default all of our AMIs have a cloud-connect agent which on boot will join your AWS instance to the Anka Build Cloud controller automatically with user data ENVs you set. This is issuing ankacluster join under the hood. Once joind, the agent which runs and communicates with the Anka Build Controller does its best to determine the proper IP to use for the node. On AWS the interfaces are loaded at different times and orders and often you’ll end up with an IP assigned to the node which cannot be used for communication. To solve this, you’ll want to set ANKA_JOIN_ARGS with --host {IP HERE} in the user data for the AWS instance. You can find all available flags/options for the join command [here](/anka-build-cloud/getting-started/preparing-and-joining-your-nodes/#joining-to-your-anka-build-cloud controller).

Our AMIs attempt to do the majority of preparation for you, however, there are several steps you need to perform once the instance is started:

  1. Set password with sudo /usr/bin/dscl . -passwd /Users/ec2-user zbun0ok= {NEWPASSWORDHERE} (AMI password: zbun0ok=). It is unsafe to continue to use the default password we set.

  2. You now need to VNC in and log into the ec2-user (requirement for Anka to start the hypervisor): open vnc://ec2-user:{NEWPASSWORDHERE}@{INSTANCEPUBLICIP}.

Amazon EBS volumes can be very slow even when you max iOPS, etc. Because of this, anka create and other processes can take very long times or outright fail (Apple’s installer is sensitive to disk IO). We recommend that you “pre-warm” the EBS volume by running dd if=/dev/random of=testfile bs=1g count=$(($(df -h | grep "/$" | awk '{print $4}' | grep -oE "[0-9]+")-2)) on the host right after it starts. Additionally, pre-warmed volumes stay warmed – no need to run dd after periods of inactivity on the AWS instance.
You can see how we generate these AMIs in our open source repo: https://github.com/veertuinc/aws-ec2-mac-amis.

Logs

  • /var/log/resize-disk.log
  • /var/log/cloud-connect.log