Relativity Server on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services, AWS, is the first cloud platform supported by the Relativity Server in the Cloud feature new in version 8.

On AWS, Relativity Server is optimized to utilize the EC2, S3, RDS and DynamoDB services. Read more about:

These direct links to the launch images for Relativity Server 8 (Preview) will take you directly to your EC2 Portal (login required) to configure and launch your Relativity Server instances:

Read Setting up Relativity Server on AWS‎ for detailed instructions and make sure to open port 7099 in your Security Group configurations to access Relativity Server.

If you would rather create your own image from scratch (and you know your way around EC2 and Linux), here are the steps we used to create these ones: Creating a Relativity Server AMI from Scratch for AWS.

Manually running Relativity Server in AWS Mode

While the most common scenario is to run Relativity Server using the images above, you can also run it in AWS mode manually – in theory even when not hosted on EC2. To enable this, simply execute Relativity.exe with the /aws or --aws command line option. This enables a few things:

  • If Relativity server detects it is running in EC2, it queries the User data for an XML config snippet to obtain its configuration. You can provide this snippet as part of the EC2 instance's configuration, as shown here.
  • If Relativity is not running in EC2, or no user data is provided, it will check for an XML config file named AWS.config next to Relativity.exe.
  • If no config file is found, or the configuration is invalid (for example the S3 bucket could not be accessed with the provided credentials), Relativity will go into read-only mode and only serve the PCTrade sample domain. A warning message will be shown on the Relativity Server root page, and Relativity Server Web Admin will be disabled.

Also note that if Relativity detects it is running in EC2 and no valid config is found in S3 yet, it will use the EC2 Instance ID as default admin password (instead of "Relativity"). Of course, once you have configured Relativity and it has stored its configuration in S3, the login defined in that config overrides this.