CloudFormation

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hello,

I’m experimenting with CloudFormation templates and have hit a bit of a snag.

There doesn’t seem to be a way for me to pass parameters from the template to the Wowza EC2 instance. With other AMIs, the user-data can be a bash script, but it would appear that Wowza expects a base64 zip file and nothing else.

I also considered using tags, but apparently Amazon doesn’t provide access to tags from the instance meta-data url. I would have to store authentication info on the server to access them through the API.

Ideally I wouldn’t have to hard code values in the startup package and could read them from the template instead. Any ideas?

Thanks!

  • david
2

You can use zipped startup packages, base64 is no (longer) required. The AWS console supports this now. It used to only work in ElasticFox, but ff4 broke that. So now use AWS, select the startup package.

Here are some packages to get started with:

http://wowzamediasystems.s3.amazonaws.com/packagelist.html

Select the page in the 2nd screen of the Instance Launch wizard:

Richard

3

Thanks Richard, but that’s not really what I was looking for.

The zip files work great except that there isn’t any way for me to embed parameters from the CloudFormation template. With other AMIs, the user data is executed as a shell script. So you have the option of setting parameters in the script since it’s just plain text.

It would be nice if Wowza could distinguish between a zip file and shell script.

What I’ve done as an alternative is create an IAM account that only has EC2 read-only permission and am embedding its credentials in the zip startup package. That way I can set tags on the instance from the CloudFormation template and read them from a script in the startup package.

-david