Tutorial for setting up a Drupal 6 site on Amazon EC2
I just completed a tutorial for running Drupal 6 on Amazon's EC2 at http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2008/09/13/running-drupal-website-amaz... . With the advent of the persistent storage that Amazon's Elastic Block Store provides, I figured that it was finally practical to operate a website out of EC2.
My site at www.sunsetlakesoftware.com has been running off of EC2 for two weeks now and I couldn't be happier with the performance. I migrated over from Media Temple's Grid-Service because I couldn't stand the slow MySQL performance I was getting from that hosting option. EC2 is more expensive (~$72 / month vs. $40 / month), but the performance and unique features (incremental snapshot backups stored on S3, the ability to create clones of your site to play with in minutes, etc.) seem to be well worth it to me. This is also a very scalable option if you anticipate sudden traffic spikes.
I apologize for the length of the writeup, but I wanted to be thorough.
Quick demo at the Meetup?
Would you mind giving a quick (or not so quick) demo at the meetup next Tuesday (the 23rd)?
Won't be around for meeting
Unfortunately, I will be out in Boston that week. I'd be glad to talk about it next month, though.
Next Month
Craig's on deck to give a talk on the Services module in October. I'm not sure how long his presentation is, or how long one on EC2 would be. If you want the 6-7 slot in October, that's fine with me; or if you'd be able to present in November that'll work too... Let me know what you'd like to do.
(Coming to BarCampMilwaukee3 next weekend 10.4-5? An EC2 Session there would be great!)
Re: Next Month
I'd be glad to go during the earlier slot in the October meeting.
Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to BarCampMilwaukee. I have to head up north for the Packer game that weekend.
Drupal AMI is out
Hey guys,
We posted this one right before Szeged:
http://www.workhabit.com/labs/drupal-ami
It connects to EBS volumes as well so you don't have to worry about persistence. The stack is optimized for the memory footprint of stock drupal on both apache and mysql, and php is running with xcache.
It's about as easy as downloading elasticfox, pointing at the AMI and clicking a button.
(Feedback, of course, is always welcome).
Where is that button?
Using your image, I'm not able to assign a Volume in RS because I can only get the image to come up as an instance and not a server (perhaps I'm missing how to provision your image as a server). However, I can link the two in EF once the image is started. New problem is formatting the volume.. This and a number of un-intuitive clicks leave me confused.
All in all it seems like its close. Perhaps a quick run through from the perspective of a user with a new Ec2 account (as of this month, there may have been changes since september) would be helpful. I'm just not sure how correct I am in setup, or which interface I should be using (again, some things respond in RS but not EF and vice versa).
Must be more than one click..
A quick update to the linked post is all I need! Screen shots not needed unless its really not clear where to click.
Thanks!
Thanks for the Tutorial,
Thanks for the Tutorial, good stuff.