The instances that run in my infrastructure get a lifespan of 14 days. This allows me to continually test that I can replace my environment at any point. People always ask me if I follow the same principal for data nodes. I posted previously about replacing nodes is an ElasticSearch cluster, this post will detail how I replace nodes in a Riak cluster
NOTE: This post assumes that you have the Riak Control console enabled for Riak.
Following my pattern of building AMIs for applications, I create my riak cluster with Packer for my AMI and Terraform for the infrastructure
###Building Riak AMIs with Packer
{% raw %}
{ "variables": { "ami_id": "", "private_subnet_id": "", "security_group_id": "", "packer_build_number": "", }, "description": "Riak Image", "builders": [ { "ami_name": "riak-{{user `packer_build_number`}}", "availability_zone": "eu-west-1a", "iam_instance_profile": "app-server", "instance_type": "t2.small", "region": "eu-west-1", "run_tags": { "role": "packer" }, "security_group_ids": [ "{{user `security_group_id`}}" ], "source_ami": "{{user `ami_id`}}", "ssh_timeout": "10m", "ssh_username": "ubuntu", "subnet_id": "{{user `private_subnet_id`}}", "tags": { "Name": "riak-packer-image" }, "type": "amazon-ebs" } ], "provisioners": [ { "type": "shell", "inline": [ "sleep 10" ] }, { "type": "shell", "script": "install_dependencies.