Drupal in the Cloud

“The Cloud” Is...

2009’s Top Buzzword

Hand-Waver Hype

Scaling Silver Bullet

When something sounds too good
to be true...
It is.

Just Say No

“Just because you’re paranoid,
don’t mean they’re not after you.”

There’s something in the cloud, but
what?

“The Cloud” really is...

Hosting!

Specifically, it’s a new model for
hosting.

Traditional hosting = Real estate

Most real estate consumers are
renters. Few love their landlord.

Owning comes with lots of
responsibilities and hidden costs.

Large scale projects are expensive,
slow, and prone to setbacks.

The Cloud = Hosting as service API

On-demand availability

Hourly pricing

Reliable, reusable start-states

The cloud is good!

Less waste

More freedom

But not a silver bullet!

Things still break

Performance can vary

Abstractions aren’t the same as the
real thing

New tricks to learn

but

The Cloud Is Drupal’s Destiny

Increase Drupal’s reach with pre-
configured servers and cookie-
cutter clusters.

Start with pennies, scale to
millions.

Create products (cheaply).

Grow organically, but still grow
fast.

Should You Host In The Cloud?
(maybe you already are)

Begin Nuts and Bolts Presentation
• Launch a server in the cloud
• Players in the space
• Anatomy of a cloud
• Cloud architecture caveats and solutions
• Putting Drupal in the cloud
• Q&A

Demo: Boot Mercury in EC2

Amazon EC2

RackSpace

Voxel

And More Every Day...

VPS is Becoming Quite Cloudy

Linode

SliceHost (Rackspace)

VPS.net

And More Every Day...

Cloud Value-Adders...

Right Scale

Scalr.net

CloudKick

getpantheon.com (shameless plug)

And. More. Every. Day.

Anatomy of a Cloud
• Servers running virtualization
• High availability network file system
• Management layer with an API
• Marketing

Caveats
• Honest clouds admit they have downtime. So will the others. Instances
will fail, though not much more often than real servers.
• Performance on any one instance can be impacted by other local
activity.
• Virtual disks have relatively poor I/O performance.

Solutions
• Accept the inevitability of failure.
• Embrace the paradigm of “rapid recovery.”
• Develop architecture with modular, replaceable parts.
• Minimize disk utilization.

Running on Cloud Infrastructure
• Monitor your load.
• Spin up more instances (scale horizontally) as you need more power.
• Add layers (scale vertically) when bottlenecks emerge.
• Create Images for each layer in your infrastructure.
• Use best practices to keep things speedy.

High Performance?
C.R.E.A.M.
• Cache
• Rules
• Everything
• Around
• Me

Scaling Drupal in the Cloud
• Front-side caching: use Pressflow+Varnish to serve cached pages
directly from RAM, and without PHP.
• Back-side caching: use Cacherouter and APC or Memcached to
minimize queries to the database and eliminate costly unserialize()
calls.
• Architect for vertical scaling by putting all the necessary services in
place on the same box.
• (This is what “Mercury” is about)

If you’re running all four layers and are
still falling down, you’re doing something
horribly right (twitter), or horribly wrong
(all my code is embedded in php content
nodes)

Q & A!