Crest Infosolutions CloudMeet on AWS

Partner Solution Deployment Guide

QS

April 2022
Rada Kichenin, Nishant Kumar, and Kapil Jain, Crest Infosolutions
Mingwei Leong, AWS ISV APAC team
Troy Ameigh, AWS Integration & Automation team

Refer to the GitHub repository to view source files, report bugs, submit feature ideas, and post feedback about this Partner Solution. To comment on the documentation, refer to Feedback.

This Partner Solution was created by Crest Infosolutions in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Partner Solutions are automated reference deployments that help people deploy popular technologies on AWS according to AWS best practices. If you’re unfamiliar with AWS Partner Solutions, refer to the AWS Partner Solution General Information Guide.

Overview

This Quick Start deploys Crest Infosolutions CloudMeet on the AWS Cloud. If you are unfamiliar with AWS Quick Starts, refer to the AWS Quick Start General Information Guide.

This Quick Start is for organizations that were unprepared to address the challenges associated with a work-from-home culture. There were challenges to keep staff connected with each-other, drive communication—across teams, departments, and organizations—make announcements, and hold virtual meetings.

CloudMeet addresses current market needs by offering a private, encrypted, and self-hosted communication platform. CloudMeet offers the following customer features:

  • Schedule and conduct online meetings from any browser, including iOS and Android devices.

  • Instant chat and group chat with file-sharing features.

  • Public, private, and broadcast channels.

Costs and licenses

There is no cost to use this Quick Start, but you are billed for any AWS services or resources that this Quick Start deploys. For more information, refer to the AWS Quick Start General Information Guide.

Architecture

Deploying this Quick Start with default parameters builds the following CloudMeet environment in the AWS Cloud.

Architecture
Figure 1. Quick Start architecture for CloudMeet on AWS

As shown in Figure 1, this Quick Start sets up the following:

  • A highly available architecture that spans two Availability Zones.*

  • A virtual private cloud (VPC) configured with public and private subnets, according to AWS best practices, to provide you with your own virtual network on AWS.*

  • In the public subnets, managed network address translation (NAT) gateways to allow outbound internet access for resources in the private subnets.*

  • In the private subnets, AWS Fargate, located in an Auto Scaling group, to provide on-demand, compute capacity for containers.

  • An internet gateway to allow access to the internet.*

  • A Network Load Balancer to balance traffic between Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.

  • Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to provide a serverless elastic file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources.

  • (Optional) Amazon Route 53 to provide hostnames.

  • A user-provided certificate stored in AWS Certificate Manager.

  • An Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket that references external environment files.

  • Container images, stored in a public Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR).

* The template that deploys this Quick Start into an existing VPC skips the components marked by asterisks and prompts you for your existing VPC configuration.

Deployment options

This Quick Start provides the following deployment options:

  • Deploy CloudMeet into a new VPC. This option builds a new AWS environment that consists of the VPC, subnets, NAT gateways, security groups, bastion hosts, and other infrastructure components. It then deploys CloudMeet into this new VPC.

  • Deploy CloudMeet into an existing VPC. This option provisions CloudMeet in your existing AWS infrastructure.

This Quick Start provides separate templates for these options. It also lets you configure Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) blocks, instance types, and CloudMeet settings.

The Quick Start can also be provisioned into two deployment types:

  • Evaluation (for testing)

  • Production (for production)

Predeployment steps

Prepare your Domain Name System (DNS) account

This Quick Start requires two subdomains with SSL certificates, which should be uploaded to AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) before deployment. The domain name should be registered in your company’s DNS servers.

Note that the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate is required only for production deployments and not for the evaluation setup.

Deployment steps

  1. Sign in to your AWS account, and launch this Partner Solution, as described under Deployment options. The AWS CloudFormation console opens with a prepopulated template.

  2. Choose the correct AWS Region, and then choose Next.

  3. On the Create stack page, keep the default setting for the template URL, and then choose Next.

  4. On the Specify stack details page, change the stack name if needed. Review the parameters for the template. Provide values for the parameters that require input. For all other parameters, review the default settings and customize them as necessary. When you finish reviewing and customizing the parameters, choose Next.

    Unless you’re customizing the Partner Solution templates or are instructed otherwise in this guide’s Predeployment section, don’t change the default settings for the following parameters: QSS3BucketName, QSS3BucketRegion, and QSS3KeyPrefix. Changing the values of these parameters will modify code references that point to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket name and key prefix. For more information, refer to the AWS Partner Solutions Contributor’s Guide.

  5. On the Configure stack options page, you can specify tags (key-value pairs) for resources in your stack and set advanced options. When you finish, choose Next.

  6. On the Review page, review and confirm the template settings. Under Capabilities, select all of the check boxes to acknowledge that the template creates AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resources that might require the ability to automatically expand macros.

  7. Choose Create stack. The stack takes about 45 minutes to deploy.

  8. Monitor the stack’s status, and when the status is CREATE_COMPLETE, the Crest Infosolutions CloudMeet deployment is ready.

  9. To view the created resources, choose the Outputs tab.

Postdeployment steps

The system requires a valid DNS entry that points to the Network Load Balancer’s Amazon Resource Name (ARN). The Network Load Balancer must have SSL certificates and Elastic IP addresses.

  1. Update your DNS by adding two entries, one for each web tier and video-call tier. Take the ARNs of the Network Load Balancers and add the appropriate entry to your DNS server.

  2. After the DNS propagates, the server is accessible through the domain name you provided in the template.

  3. Test your login credentials using jsnow for both the user name and password. You can change and disable the test user accounts via the identity-management system that’s included in the stack.

Test the deployment

When the AWS CloudFormation template creates the stack, the Fargate instance runs in your AWS cluster. The CloudMeet application installs in the Amazon ECS host instances.

Evaluation

Verify that the CloudMeet application is running and accessible:

  1. In the AWS CloudFormation console, navigate to Service Stack, and choose the Outputs tab.

  2. Note the value of the corresponding Key Attributes:

** KEY Attribute1 - RCHATEVALNLBURL
** KEY Attribute2 - JVBEVALNLBURL
** KEY Attribute3 - CloudmeetDomain
** KEY Attribute4 - CloudcallDomain

  1. Provide the KEY Attributes to support@progentys.com. The Progentys support team maps the shared values of these attributes to the provided domain name.

  2. When Progentys completes the mapping, customers can use a web browser to access the URL (https://cloudmeetdomain/cloudmeet).

  3. By default, the user name and password are jsnow.

Production

To verify that the CloudMeet application is running and accessible, follow this step:

  1. In the AWS CloudFormation console, choose the Outputs tab from Service Stack.

  2. Note the value of the corresponding KEY Attribute:

** KEY Attribute - CloudmeetDomain

  1. Use a web browser to access the URL (https://cloudmeetdomain/cloudmeet).

  2. By default, the user name and password are jsnow.

Security

At startup, only port 22 is open. You can restrict this port by providing an IP address or range of IP addresses for the AdminIngressLocation parameter. If you want to open these ports to everyone, set the IP address to 0.0.0.0/0. This is not advised, however, because your instances will be less secure.

Troubleshooting

For troubleshooting common Quick Start issues, refer to the AWS Quick Start General Information Guide and Troubleshooting CloudFormation.

Customer responsibility

After you deploy a Partner Solution, confirm that your resources and services are updated and configured—including any required patches—to meet your security and other needs. For more information, refer to the Shared Responsibility Model.

Feedback

To submit feature ideas and report bugs, use the Issues section of the GitHub repository for this Partner Solution. To submit code, refer to the Partner Solution Contributor’s Guide. To submit feedback on this deployment guide, use the following GitHub links:

Notices

This document is provided for informational purposes only. It represents current AWS product offerings and practices as of the date of issue of this document, which are subject to change without notice. Customers are responsible for making their own independent assessment of the information in this document and any use of AWS products or services, each of which is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, whether expressed or implied. This document does not create any warranties, representations, contractual commitments, conditions, or assurances from AWS, its affiliates, suppliers, or licensors. The responsibilities and liabilities of AWS to its customers are controlled by AWS agreements, and this document is not part of, nor does it modify, any agreement between AWS and its customers.

The software included with this paper is licensed under the Apache License, version 2.0 (the "License"). You may not use this file except in compliance with the License. A copy of the License is located at https://aws.amazon.com/apache2.0/ or in the accompanying "license" file. This code is distributed on an "as is" basis, without warranties or conditions of any kind, either expressed or implied. Refer to the License for specific language governing permissions and limitations.