EC2 Auto Discovery
Hazelcast supports EC2 Auto Discovery. It is useful when you do not want or cannot provide the list of possible IP addresses. To configure your cluster to be able to use EC2 Auto Discovery, disable join over multicast and TCP/IP and enable AWS. Also provide your credentials (access and secret keys). The aws tag accepts an attribute called connection-timeout-seconds whose default value is 5. Increasing this value is recommended if you have many IPs listed and members cannot properly build up the cluster.
Below is a sample configuration.
<join>
<multicast enabled="false">
<multicast-group>224.2.2.3</multicast-group>
<multicast-port>54327</multicast-port>
</multicast>
<tcp-ip enabled="false">
<interface>192.168.1.2</interface>
</tcp-ip>
<aws enabled="true">
<access-key>my-access-key</access-key>
<secret-key>my-secret-key</secret-key>
<region>us-west-1</region> <!-- optional, default is us-east-1 -->
<host-header>ec2.amazonaws.com</host-header> <!-- optional, default is ec2.amazonaws.com.
If set, region shouldn't be set as it will override this property -->
<security-group-name>hazelcast-sg</security-group-name> <!-- optional -->
<tag-key>type</tag-key> <!-- optional -->
<tag-value>hz-nodes</tag-value> <!-- optional -->
</aws>
</join>
You need to add hazelcast-cloud.jar dependency into your project. Note that it is also bundled inside hazelcast-all.jar. Hazelcast cloud module does not depend on any other third party modules.
Related Information
You can download the white paper Hazelcast on AWS: Best Practices for Deployment from Hazelcast.com.