Ubiquiti UNMS on AWS

It has been a long time since my last post. I had so much many upgrades for my WISP and network that I wanted to do during the Christmas holiday and as usual nothing went as planned. But this is not about that. 

This post is about my trial with UNMS. UNMS is Ubiquiti new device management software for WISP. It seems like it is meant to replace AirControl 2 and at some stage integrate with UniFi. Currently the software is in beta with many features missing, According to the roadmap UNMS should be feature complete before 2019. But you can download and install the beta version and have a play around. In my case I acquired an Ubiquiti airCube AC which integrates with UNMS.

Note: AWS might charge you for using their services. Example t2.micro instance is free but t2.small cost me  $0.0232 per On Demand Linux Instance Hour.
 
I followed these instructions: UNMS installation. I started of by creating a free AWS account. Before creating your instance, check if you are in the right region (top right next to you account name). I created an EC2 - t2.micro instance from a template which I then upgraded to a t2.small instance. Associate an IP address with my new instance and update the security groups to unblock port 443 (default port used by UNMS, can be changed).

Navigating to the instance elastic IP-address should bring up the UNMS welcome screen. Once you completed the UNMS basic setup you can set up sites and attempt to connect client devices. I don't want to go into too much detail. The forums are a great resource if you get stuck. 

It was an interesting exercise to set this up and learn some basics around AWS. I don't know what I will do in the feature. Probably just install and run it on a home build server instead.

Update: I run UNMS on a local server inside a Virtual Machine. I don't need to run it continuously because I still use AirControl 2 for ease of use with my small WISP. Only when you add newer ubiquiti devices that are not supported by AirControl 2 will you require UNMS.