Create an Amazon Load Balancer

You can use the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Management Console to create a load balancer and add Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to it. Steps for doing this are as follows:

1. Log in to the AWS Management Console and click EC2.
2. Click Load Balancers.
3. Click Create Load Balancer.
4. Type a load balancer name.
5. Choose whether to create the load balancer in your virtual private cloud (VPC) or EC2-Classic.
6. Click Add to add listener configuration rules. Choose the ports and protocols to be used by your load balancer. You need to define the port on which HTTP traffic will enter the load balancer (Load Balancer Port) and the port to which HTTP traffic will be forwarded (Instance Port).

   In many ArcGIS Server scenarios, you can set the Load Balancer Port as 80 and the Instance Port as 6080, which is ArcGIS Server's port. To save this rule in the AWS Management Console, you need to remove the default rule of 80 forwarding to 80. If you have configured ArcGIS Web Adaptor on your instance, you would use the web adaptor port for the Instance Port instead of 6080.

   When you finish setting these values, click Continue.

7. Set the configuration options for the load balancer health check.

   Your load balancer periodically checks its attached instances to ensure that they are still responsive. The checks are performed by pinging a page on the instance, by default /index.html, and determining whether a valid response was returned. You must either configure a page /index.html on your instances or change the value for Ping Path to a page located at an identical location on each instance. A good setting for Ping Path is a page related to your GIS server implementation, such as the REST URL of one of your map services.

   When you finish configuring the health check, click Continue.

8. Choose the subnets for your load balancer to use and click Continue.
9. Choose or create a security group to associate with your load balancer.
10. Click Continue to skip the wizard panel that adds instances to the load balancer.

    You can add instances to your load balancer at a later time. You don't have to add any instances right now to create the load balancer.

11. Add tags to help you identify your load balancer. Click Continue when you finish.
12. Review the information about your load balancer and, if necessary, go back and make any corrections. When you're satisfied with the configuration options, click Create to create the load balancer.
13. Click Close to close the wizard.
14. Find your new load balancer in the Load Balancers section of the AWS Management Console. Note the DNS name of the load balancer. To take advantage of the load balancer, you should now include this in any URLs you use to reference your GIS server site.