Hosting Drupal on Amazon EC2

About me
Kornel Lugosi (Coornail)
Student at University of Szeged
Drupal developer @ Pronovix
Linux enthusiastic

How to use Amazon EC2 for Drupal

My idea about “ Why this #$%$@&^% thing is not working? ”
Time ->

Hosting solutions
Webhosting
Initial cost is cheap
Monthly cost is cheap
Is it reliable?
No customization
No server maintenance

Hosting solutions
Virtual Private Server
Initial cost is moderate
Monthly cost is moderate
Is it reliable?
Is it fast?
Full customization
You have to maintain the software
Usually the memory is quite limited

Hosting solutions
Dedicated Server
Initial cost is very high
Monthly cost is cheap
Is it reliable?
It's fast
Full customization
You have to maintain the software and the hardware

Hosting solutions
Amazon cloud
Initial cost is moderate
Monthly cost is moderate
Is it reliable?
Full customization (even in the hardware in minutes)
You have to maintain the software (and that's harder here)

About amazon ec2
Virtualised Hardwares (Instances)
Distributed
Dynamically scalable

Some terms

“ My server is fast and strong, why would I need that?”

Maybe you'll need more servers... like tomorrow

Hardware will eventually break down

You don't have to worry about those ^^

That's not true
Errors can be present at the software level in the AMI
Nothing guarantees that if you start a server instance it will run 'til the end of time
The AMI s storage is not permanent!

What happens if an instance gets terminated?
Your data is lost

Permanent storage
S3 ( S imple S torage S ervice)
Does n't store files
Stores “ objects ”, “ buckets ” and “ keys ”
You have to design the application to use it
“ There is a module for that” : project/amazon_s3
EBS ( E lastic B lock S tore )
Provides traditional block devices
It can store any filesystem (and any file )

Permanent storage
S3 ( S imple S torage S ervice)
Backing up EBS -s
Upload bundled AMIs
EBS ( E lastic B lock S tore )
Mount it (in a specific region)
Store your drupal files and database on it! ( /var, and /home propably )

Tools
Command line tools
To create new AMI s
You can automatize things!
(Write aliases for the keys)
Browsing images not working in the eu? Seriously?

Command line

Tools
Web console
Limted features
What works, works great
You cannot boundle images

Web console

Tools
Elasticfox
Laggy responsiveness
No feedback that it's doing anything
It has a lot of options (and almost everything is working)
( Install it in a different profile )

Elasticfox

Other tools
S3 firefox organizer (still, those are not files)

Performance is money
Bandwidth
mod_gzip ( check Drupals js/css mime types! )
mod_expire
ssh -C ( I mean we're talking about linux, right? )
( net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse = 1 )
( net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle =1 )
Memory
pecl install apc
Apache mod_fastcgi / nginx + *fcgi

The legend of disk IO
It's not legendary slow, but slow
Bandwidth is okay, latency is slow

Stop whining, there's a workaround
Save on memory -> faster disc io
apc.ini: apc.shm_size="[bignumber]"
Start using fastcgi (it has almost constant memory consumption -> filecache lives longer)
Optimize disk io
Use noop scheduler ( echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler )
Use noatime , nodiratime ( /etc/fstab )
(Use ext4, data=writeback )

Stop whining, there's a workaround
php.ini : realpath_cache_size=1M
Use multisite (apc cache)
(Consider using nginx ?)

Relational Database Service
You can outsource mysql ! (costs a lot)
Full mysql 5.1 compilance (they said)
More instances can use it!

Still want to use it?
We do =)
Not fitting for everybody

http://saylinux.net	154
http://www.slideshare.net	42
http://dominiquelacan.blogspot.com	2

Hosting Drupal on Amazon EC2

by Kornel Lugosi on Nov 02, 2009

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Hosting Drupal on Amazon EC2 — Presentation Transcript