Octopus purpose?

Posted by playfulwolf on January 6, 2012 at 9:58pm

Hi,

First of all: great job of making automate scripts - Barracuda is flying on relatively cheap VPS, installation probably took 1/20th of time needed to do similar by hand, but one question remains:

What is the purpose of Octopus? I will use this Aegir instance only internally, that means I will be the only administrator, maybe 1-3 more persons will have an access. So, is there a need to install Octopus? I have read few times everything on project page, understood all words (my native is not english) but the whole meaning - not. Especially Is there any "Octopus for dummies" guide?

Thank you for your patience.

Comments

Octopus for you might install

Posted by zkrebs on January 6, 2012 at 11:26pm

Octopus for you might install 10+ Drupal Platforms automatically, and upgrade them / share code base / come with caching solutions. Comes in very handy. Also, you can mess with an Octopus instance without destroying your main Aegir install as easily. My two cents.

I don't get

Posted by playfulwolf on January 7, 2012 at 8:59pm

I don't get: if you run hostmaster platform on Aegir and don't touch it - there will be no problems anyway, is it correct?

^{drupal+me: jeweler portfolio}

The purpose of Octopus

Posted by AquaticDisorder on January 6, 2012 at 11:43pm

As mentioned by slavojzizek if you mess up an octopus instance you can blow it away and start again see:
https://github.com/omega8cc/nginx-for-drupal/wiki/How-To-Delete-An-Octop...

Also can depend on use case, for example, you may have different clients each with their own octopus instance.

I suppose the question is,

Posted by geofftech on January 8, 2012 at 3:48am

I suppose the question is, other than provide some default platforms, does a site setup on the root Barracuda instance have andy extra or missing functionality that a similar site set up on a Octopus satelite?

Put another way, if I set up a platform and domain with in the master site. And then set up the same platform and domain name in an Octopus Satelite. Is there any differences? Any extra caching or tricks that Octopus adds that are not in the base Barracuda install?

I have my server set up using Barracuda and Octopus - but I do not use any of the platforms installed by Octopus. Just my own platform. I use the migrate to move between updates of that single profile. So if Octopus adds no extra functionality, for me, it only add a second level of complexity.

http://geoff.com.au - http://redronin.com

I suppose to answer, from my

Posted by zkrebs on January 8, 2012 at 4:46am

I suppose to answer, from my limited knowledge set,

is that Octopus instances can have their platforms upgraded automatically, and new platforms added. They also have limited ssh / sftp for users.

So you could set up an Octopus instance for your clients - like in the model of a hosting company.

The octopus platforms of Pressflow and maybe some other ones have a symlinked folder with cache modules that are known to work on the BOA stack. Just comes in handy vs selecting/dl'ing everything yourself. Don't think there's anything special going on...

There's really no reason to have Octopus if you don't care about all that... however, in my experience, when I moved from having just a Barracuda instance with sites to a mixed Barracuda / Octopus model, I seemed to have less problems. Hope this helps and isn't just crappy info.

My understanding is that

Posted by jtbayly on January 8, 2012 at 4:56am

My understanding is that Octopus will automatically symlink some modules into any platform you create. Most of these are meant to help performance. Most of these sorts of modules require specific configuration in Apache, memcached, Nginx etc.

Again, my understanding is that the modules that this configuration is already done in Octopus for the modules that are being included by default.

So, if I'm right, this allows you to take advantage of some nice performance enhancements. It's not just that they picked the modules that are known to work in that environment. It's also that they configured/tuned the system for those particular modules.

Correct

Posted by omega8cc on January 8, 2012 at 8:58am

Some important parts of our performance related tuning, like Speed Booster with its new Purge feature/module, like Redis/Memcached chained cache configuration will not work out of the box for sites hosted on the Barracuda hostmaster instance, unless you will modify the default global.inc logic, using existing there possibility to add your own overrides.

It is because our default global.inc logic expects some paths to modules, which are added automatically only in the Octopus instances in the Octopus specific o_contrib directory. And yes, those extra modules are added also to your custom platforms you will manage on your Octopus instance.

Octopus also comes with some useful improvements to the Aegir site user interface and creates extra admin user with safe privileges and simplified UX. It also comes with separate limited shell user, with handy shortcuts and some restrictions preventing your from breaking your install, as you could do that easily when using Aegir standard/system user.

The idea behind this kind of separation is to give you a choice - you can use Octopus with all its mods and extras, or just use vanilla Aegir on your Barracuda instance (if you know what are you doing), but we recommend to use Octopus and avoid using Barracuda based hostmaster if you are looking to safely leverage all the BOA goodness and save some grey hairs while learning how to use Aegir properly.

hmm...

Posted by playfulwolf on January 8, 2012 at 9:13pm

was out from community form a while also form Aegir stuff - everything now seems so much more complex :/