The herd team created an AWS CloudFormation template in order to make it super-easy to start a demo environment. Please be aware that although there is no additional charge for AWS CloudFormation, you still may pay for the AWS resources that are created (e.g., Amazon EC2 and RDS instances). The template will perform these steps:

• Create EC2 instance with Tomcat and Postgres
• Create herd schema in the Postgres DB and populate basic configuration data and example reference data
• Deploy herd war to Tomcat
• Create necessary AWS security groups and roles
• Launch the herd instance

Basic knowledge of AWS is required, for example creation and management of EC2 and S3 resources and Security Groups.

In order to create a new stack containing Herd application, perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to the latest version of the Herd CloudFormation script jar in the Sonatype OSS repository
2. Click the 'Artifact' tab in the lower right portion of the screen and then click the 'Download' button to obtain the script jar.
3. Extract the script jar to a local directory and locate the herd.localdb.template file
4. Login to your AWS Console and click on CloudFormation service.
5. Select 'Create New Stack' and browse for the template file you located in the previous step. Click Next.
6. The next screen allows you to enter the name of your Stack and presents a list of parameters. All parameters have default values which are fine to configure and start a demo instance, except for the KeyName.
7. Please specify name of the key which you have in your AWS account, so you can later ssh to the herd application server. This is not required for the demo to start, but is quite useful if you later would want to modify something.
8. Click 'Next' and optionally tag resources in herd stack. This allows you to distinguish resources created by this template.
9. On the last page acknowledge that stack will create IAM resources and click 'Create'.

Stack creation will take approximately 5 minutes depending on the region load. When stack reaches "CREATE_COMPLETE" state, please examine 'Output tab' and find the IP address of newly-created herd application server, URLs for build info, REST API documentation and UI.

Note you can currently only start the stack in "us-east-1" region.

The best way to continue learning is to go through our Quick Start to Registering Data tutorial. This has explanations and examples that will help you understand some of the first tasks you should perform with herd. For more broad exploration, check out the REST API documentation link in the output of your stack - each REST service has a brief explanation, example requests and responses, and a 'Try It' link to exercise the service in the demo environment.

When you are done with it, you can shutdown and delete stack using same AWS CloudFormation page. Select the stack and click Delete.