## Launching ElasticInbox with Whirr

Follow these instructions to start a cluster on EC2 running ElasticInbox

Install Whirr

Run the following commands from you local machine.

Set your AWS credentials as environment variables:

% export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=...
% export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...

Download and install Whirr:

% curl -O http://www.apache.org/dist/incubator/whirr/whirr-0.6.0-incubating/whirr-0.6.0-incubating.tar.gz
% tar zxf whirr-0.6.0-incubating.tar.gz
% export PATH=$PATH:$(pwd)/whirr-0.6.0-incubating/bin

Create a password-less SSH keypair for Whirr to use:

% ssh-keygen -t rsa -P '' -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa_scm

Install Whirr ElasticInbox Plugin

Build plugin from source:

% git clone git://github.com/elasticinbox/whirr-elasticinbox.git
% cd whirr-elasticinbox
% mvn clean install

Copy the generated JAR file to Whirr's lib directory.

Launch an ElasticInbox Cluster

The following command will start a cluster of 3 nodes running Cassandra and ElasticInbox. To change the number of nodes edit elasticinbox-ec2.properties file. You may want to change other recipe details before launching.

% whirr launch-cluster --config elasticinbox-ec2.properties

Whirr will report progress to the console as it runs. The command will exit when the cluster is ready to be used.

Configure the ElasticInbox cluster

Create schema by running following command on one of the nodes (currently we cannot automate this step due to limitation in Whirr, see WHIRR-221). Replace $PRIVATE_IP with private IP of any Cassandra host (ifconfig eth0).

% $CASSANDRA_HOME/bin/cassandra-cli --host $PRIVATE_IP < /tmp/elasticinbox.cml

Optionally, you may want to adjust Cassandra token ranges. By default, when not specified, Cassandra picks up a random token, which will lead to hot spots.

Use the cluster

Add AWS LoadBalancer with TCP/2400 for all ElasticInbox instances. Use smtp-source command to generate LMTP traffic. For instance, following command will send 100 messages with size of 4K in 40 concurrent streams:

# apt-get install postfix

% time smtp-source -L -s 40 -m 100 -l 4096 -d -c -f me@elasticinbox.com \
    -t test@elasticinbox.com ElasticInbox-LB-1070648408.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com:2400

Shutdown the cluster

Finally, when you want to shutdown the cluster, run the following command. Note that all data and state stored on the cluster will be lost.

% whirr destroy-cluster --config elasticinbox-ec2.properties