Configure a highly available portal with Amazon S3—ArcGIS Enterprise in the cloud

ArcGIS Enterprise portals store information about portal items in the portal content directory. When you configure a highly available portal—which is composed of two portal machines—both machines share the content directory. To make your content highly available, store the Portal for ArcGIS content directory in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket.

In this workflow, you will create a bucket on Amazon S3, create a portal that uses the S3 bucket for its content directory, and launch a second portal instance that you join to the portal on the first portal instance.

Create a highly available portal with content directory on S3

Follow these steps to create a highly available portal that uses an Amazon S3 bucket to store the portal's content directory, thereby making the content directory highly available:

Create an Amazon S3 bucket using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Management Console.
Create the bucket in the same region in which you will create your portal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.
Complete steps 1 through 8 in Deploy a base ArcGIS Enterprise portal on AWS.

Do not proceed with creating a site from the portal website. You must open the ArcGIS Portal Directory, and create the portal there.

Open the ArcGIS Portal Directory. The URL is in the format https://portal.domain.com:7443/arcgis/portaladmin.
Click Create New Site.
Create the initial portal administrator account.
Import the license file you downloaded in step 1.
Copy one of the following blocks of JSON and paste it into the Content Store field. Be sure to replace connectionString values with information specific to your account and implementation. For the objectStore, provide the name of the S3 bucket you created in step 1 to store the content directory.
Use this JSON if you want to access the S3 bucket using the accessKeyId and secretAccessKey of your AWS account:
```
{
"type": "cloudStore",
"provider": "Amazon",
"connectionString": {"accessKeyId":"ABCDEFGHIJK123456","secretAccessKey": "ZYXWVUTSRQPONML98765432","region": "<region name>","credentialType": "accessKey"},
"objectStore": "<your S3 bucket>"
}
```
Use this JSON if you want to access the S3 bucket through an IAMRole you configured for your AWS account:
```
{
"type": "cloudStore",
"provider": "Amazon",
"connectionString": {"region": "<region name>","credentialType": "IAMRole"},
"objectStore": "<your S3 bucket>"
}
```
Click Create New Site.

Next, install and configure ArcGIS Web Adaptor.

Complete steps 10 through 13 in Deploy a base ArcGIS Enterprise portal on AWS to install ArcGIS Web Adaptor and configure it with Portal for ArcGIS.

The first portal machine is now configured. Now, launch a second EC2 instance, install and start Portal for ArcGIS, and join the second instance to the first portal instance.

Launch a second EC2 instance.
Create a remote connection to the second instance and install Portal for ArcGIS on it.
Open the portal website for the second Portal for ArcGIS installation (https://<fully qualified instance2 name>:7443/arcgis/home) and choose the Join existing portal option.
Enter the Portal URL for the portal you configured on the first instance.
The URL is in the format https://<fully qualified instance1 name>:7443.
Enter the username and password for the initial portal administrator you created in step 5 above.
Click Join.

You now have two AWS instances running Portal for ArcGIS using a shared, highly available content directory stored on S3.

Note:

If you delete the portal deployment in the future, you must manually empty and delete the S3 bucket used for the content directory; uninstalling Portal for ArcGIS will not delete the content directory or the bucket.

Next steps

To make the entire ArcGIS Enterprise portal highly available, the hosting GIS Server site and ArcGIS Data Store also need to be highly available. See the following topics for instructions to configure a highly available GIS Server site and ArcGIS Data Store:

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