DataMasque Portal

DataMasque Installation from AWS Marketplace

This guide describes the installation and initial configuration of a DataMasque instance deployed using one of the available DataMasque software products on the AWS Marketplace.

DataMasque AWS Marketplace software products

DataMasque’s software products in the AWS Marketplace are delivered with Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).
You may deploy DataMasque application by launching an AWS EC2 instance with a DataMasque AWS Marketplace AMI.

You can view the available DataMasque AMI products available on the AWS Marketplace here.

Free trial product

You may trial DataMasque for free using this DataMasque software product. This product is valid for 30 days from the time you launch your AWS EC2 instance and supports masking up to 1000 rows per table per masking run or 5 files per file masking run.

Contract Product

DataMasque Contract Products require a DataMasque license to be purchased through your AWS account. DataMasque will check out this license to perform masking.

To enable the license checkout process, the IAM Role attached to the EC2 instance must have the necessary permissions to both check out and check in licenses. The required permission actions are license-manager:CheckoutLicense and license-manager:CheckInLicense.

Below is an example of an IAM policy JSON document that grants these permissions:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "DataMasqueLicenseCheckInAndOut",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "license-manager:CheckoutLicense",
                "license-manager:CheckInLicense"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Since the license ARN will change per account and license, it is set to * here. You may wish to replace this wildcard with the ARN of your DataMasque license, if you know it.

When setting up DataMasque, you will need to choose if you want to check out a Business or Enterprise license. The one you choose must match that of the license you have purchased. If you change the type of license you have purchased through your AWS account, or accidentally select the wrong license type at setup, you can update the type of license to check out at any time, by changing the type on the My Account screen.

Flexible pricing products

DataMasque offers flexible pricing products with either an hourly price or a fixed monthly price to suit your needs.

You can find the available DataMasque flexible pricing products here.

DataMasque instances deployed using DataMasque’s flexible pricing products allow you to mask data up to the total masked database size quota specified in each pricing product and charged by the defined subscription pricing model, hourly or monthly.

BYOL (bring-your-own-licence) product

You may purchase a licence by contacting sales@datamasque.com for use with your DataMasque instances deployed using the DataMasque (BYOL) product.

Note: refer to the Usage calculation information from the Licensing page for details on estimating the total unique masked database size quota you need.

Prerequisites

AWS account

You will need a valid AWS account in order to deploy a DataMasque instance using one of the available DataMasque software products.

IMDS version

Your EC2 instance must have access to the Instance Metadata Service. Without access, DataMasque will not be able to validate your instance ID or retrieve the IAM Role.

By default, both IMDSv1 and IMDSv2 are accessible to the instance. However, a specific version can be enforced by using the AWS CLI to modify the instance metadata. Please refer to the documentation below regarding the configuration of instance metadata:

When requiring IMDSv2, the hop limit must be set to 2. Otherwise, the instance will not be able to reach the AWS endpoint and obtain the necessary headers to retrieve the required token.

Refer to the AWS modify PUT response hop limit documentation for how to set the hop limit.

Optional configurations

Static external IP address

If you need a static public IP address to access your DataMasque instance in addition to using your EC2 instance’s private IP address, you will need to attach an Elastic IP address to your DataMasque instance.

DataMasque must also be configured with the Elastic IP addresses that you have associated with your DataMasque instance in order for you to access using the configured Elastic IP addresses. These can be configured with the global Hostnames setting from the Settings page.

Private subnet

It is recommended to deploy your DataMasque instance on a private subnet with appropriate access control.

Host security

Standard security practices should be applied to the DataMasque host EC2. Such best practices include, but are not limited to:

  • Restrict access control using security groups or network ACLs
  • Host filesystem encryption. Follow this guide to enable filesystem encryption on your EC2 instance.
  • Regular OS security patching
  • Intrusion detection
  • Virus scanning

Enable outbound SMTP traffic

By default, AWS blocks outbound SMTP traffic of all EC2 instances. Follow this link for the steps to allow outbound traffic on port 25 (SMTP) for your DataMasque instance running on an AWS EC2 instance.

Provisioned AWS resources on deployment

The following AWS resources will be set up in your AWS account after deploying DataMasque using a DataMasque AWS Marketplace AMI.

An EC2 instance

An EC2 instance with your selected instance type will be created to host your DataMasque instance with the following OS configurations:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the base operating system.
  • A 40GB root EBS volume.

A security group to allow SSH and HTTPS connections

As part of launching your DataMasque EC2 instance, you can choose to create a new security group for the deployment or to use an existing security group available in your account. If you choose to create a new security group for the deployment, the new security group is configured with inbound rules to allow SSH (port 22) and HTTPS (443) from anywhere (0.0.0.0/0) by default. It is important to restrict access and only allow traffic from a set of known IP addresses or security groups to prevent public exposure.

Note: The deployment does not create or use any other public or private AWS resources other than the listed resources in this section.

Configuring your DataMasque instance

Once your AWS EC2 instance is launched and ready for connection, you can access your DataMasque instance from a client web browser at https://<instance-ip-or-hostname>.

Follow the Post-Installation Setup guide to complete your installation of DataMasque.

Configuring network access to your target databases

You will need to allow network access between your DataMasque instance and your target databases before executing masking runs against your target databases. Once the network access has been set up, refer to the Database Connections user guide to configure the connection details for your target databases.

Troubleshooting and maintenance

Verifying the DataMasque processes

DataMasque is a fully containerised application and runs in Docker containers. Once the EC2 instance has started, you can SSH to the EC2 host to confirm the DataMasque Docker containers are running with the following command:

docker ps --format "table {{.ID}}\t{{.Status}}\t{{.Names}}"

You should see five DataMasque containers listed:

CONTAINER ID        STATUS              NAMES
60114d0c370d        Up 3 minutes        datamasque_admin-frontend_1
da8bacfbbe48        Up 3 minutes        datamasque_admin-server_1
c9555bf98017        Up 3 minutes        datamasque_agent-worker_1
d46296fd5b3b        Up 3 minutes        datamasque_agent-queue_1
1d5516575e1c        Up 3 minutes        datamasque_admin-db_1

It is also recommended to monitor the health of your DataMasque instance. Refer to the API documentation for authentication and the health check API endpoint.

Data protection

It is recommended to take regular backups of your DataMasque EC2 instance. It is also recommended to periodically save copies of your Run Logs, as well as Ruleset and Connection configurations.

Upgrading DataMasque

It is recommended that you take backups of all rulesets, connections, and uploaded files before upgrading your DataMasque instance.

Download the new DataMasque Docker package from DataMasque Customer Portal.

To upgrade your DataMasque instance, extract the new DataMasque Docker Compose package, and run the included installation script with the --upgrade option:

tar -xvzf datamasque-v<version>.pkg
cd datamasque/<version>/
sudo ./install.sh --upgrade

Restarting DataMasque

To restart the DataMasque Docker containers, run the following command as ec2-user:

sudo docker compose -f /usr/local/etc/datamasque/docker-compose.yml restart

You can verify that all five DataMasque containers have successfully restarted by running the following command as ec2-user:

sudo docker ps --format "table {{.ID}}\t{{.Status}}\t{{.Names}}"

DataMasque logs

For DataMasque 2.17 and newer

DataMasque logs can be downloaded through the web UI, by selecting Logs in the sidebar, then clicking Application Logs…. If the web UI is not accessible, then follow the instructions for DataMasque older than 2.17.0 below.

For DataMasque older than 2.17.0

Important DataMasque logs can be extracted from the Docker containers with the following commands.

Create a directory to store the logs:

  mkdir -p <path to a log directory>

Then, follow the instructions below, which vary according to DataMasque version. Choose the section corresponding to the version of DataMasque that generated the logs you want (normally the current version - but if you have recently upgraded, you may be looking for logs from the previous version).

Old log files are not deleted on upgrade, so if you have upgraded to 2.16.1 or newer from a previous version, you can follow both sections to retrieve all log files.

For DataMasque 2.16.1 and newer

DataMasque 2.16.1 introduced log rotation. There can now be up to 10 of each log file, hence the entire log directory must be copied from the container. The most recent log file has the extension .log while the others have the extension .log.1, .log.2, and so on.

To copy the DataMasque logs to a <log directory>:

sudo docker cp datamasque_admin-server_1:/files/logs/ <log directory>

DataMasque records three types of logs:

  • Application runner logs are in the files starting with masque_requests.log.
  • Web application logs are in the files starting with masque_admin_server.log.
  • Masking agent logs are in the files starting with masque_agent.log.

For DataMasque 2.16.0 and earlier

  • To copy the DataMasque web application runner logs to a <log directory>:
  sudo docker cp datamasque_admin-server_1:/files/logs/uwsgi.log <log directory>
  • To copy the DataMasque web application logs to a <log directory>:
  sudo docker cp datamasque_admin-server_1:/files/logs/django.log <log directory>
  • To copy the DataMasque masking agent logs to a <log directory>:
  sudo docker cp datamasque_agent-worker_1:/files/logs/celery.log <log directory>
  • To obtain the STDOUT from a container, run docker logs <NAME OF CONTAINER>.
  • For example, to obtain the STDOUT logs from the admin-db container, run the following command:
  docker logs datamasque_admin-db_1

Support information

DataMasque provides full product and installation support within 72 hours of making an enquiry. Contact the support team at support@datamasque.com for any enquiries you may have.