Kestra Event-Driven Orchestration Server - Hardened

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Why This Kestra AMI Over Self-Managed Installation

Kestra is an open-source, event-driven orchestration platform for building and running data and business workflows. You declare pipelines as YAML flows - readable, reviewable and version-controllable - and a large plugin catalogue (600+ plugins) connects them to databases, cloud services, message queues, containers and scripts in any language.

This AMI eliminates the setup work that typically takes hours of dependency wrangling, database configuration and security hardening. A fully configured, production-shaped Kestra server answers within minutes of launch - unlike self-managed installs that default to an in-memory H2 database (losing state on restart) and ship with no authentication (exposing remote code execution).

## Application Stack

• Kestra open-source core running as a single-node standalone server (scheduler, executor, worker and web server in one JVM), pinned to an exact upstream container image by digest
• Bundled PostgreSQL provides a durable repository AND queue - every flow, execution and secret is persisted, so orchestration state survives restarts
• Local internal storage for flow artifacts on a dedicated, independently-resizable EBS data disk
• systemd-managed - the entire stack runs under one service via Docker Compose and starts automatically on boot
• Full plugin catalogue ships in the image, so your flows can use Kestra's 600+ plugins out of the box

## Security and Hardening

Unique Credentials Per Instance: Unlike default Kestra which ships no authentication, on first boot this image generates a fresh Web UI/API password, a fresh PostgreSQL password and a fresh secret encryption key - all unique to that instance and written to a root-only file. No shared or default credential ships in the image.

Defense in Depth: The UI and API are reachable only through an nginx reverse proxy on port 443 (per-instance self-signed TLS) gated by HTTP Basic authentication, AND Kestra's own basic authentication is configured with the same per-instance credential. Kestra itself binds to loopback only; PostgreSQL is never published to a host port.

Network Security Guidance: Restrict port 443 to trusted IP ranges in your security group, or place the instance behind an AWS Application Load Balancer with a trusted ACM certificate. Enable EBS encryption on your volumes for data-at-rest protection.

## Concrete Use Case: E-Commerce Data Pipeline

A mid-size e-commerce team uses this AMI to orchestrate nightly ingestion of order, inventory and clickstream data from multiple APIs into Amazon Redshift. Flows are authored as YAML, version-controlled in Git, and scheduled to run every 15 minutes during peak hours - with full execution history, Gantt views and topology visualization in the Kestra web UI for monitoring and debugging.

## Additional Use Cases

• Orchestrate ETL pipelines across databases, AWS services and third-party APIs
• Schedule and monitor business workflows with full execution history and topology views
• Build and version-control automation as declarative YAML flows that non-engineers can read

## Getting Started

1. Launch the AMI on your chosen EC2 instance type

2. Allow inbound TCP 443 (and 22 for SSH) from your IP in the security group

3. Wait approximately two minutes for first-boot credential generation to complete

4. SSH in and retrieve your credentials from the root-only file

5. Browse to https://your-instance-ip/, accept the self-signed certificate, answer the basic-auth prompt, and start authoring flows

Want a guided walkthrough? Contact cloudimg support to schedule a free 15-minute deployment session.

## About cloudimg

cloudimg provides 24/7 technical support by email and live chat. Our engineers specialize in orchestration operations and help with deployment, upgrades, plugin configuration, flow authoring, performance tuning and PostgreSQL administration.

Kestra is a trademark of its respective holder. This image is not affiliated with or endorsed by Kestra Technologies Inc. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.