Mercury is an open-source effort to create reusable, common, stable, kickass stacks for running Drupal. It began as an effort targeted to Amazon EC2, but really wants to have its stacks run anywhere/everywhere Drupal is found.
The current best place to get code from is this GitHub repository:
https://github.com/boztek/mercury
The ideas here have also spawned Pantheon Systems, which provides commercial service, but this group is about free and open-source DIY server configuration for Drupal.
Project Mercury: Pre-configured Drupal+Varnish AMI
Inspired by my own work over the past year with Amazon EC2 and this great post from Eric Hammond at Alestic on how to bundle public AMIs, today I released my first public machine image. I call the project "mercury," and the goal is to combine the power of Varnish and Pressflow Drupal in one easy-to-run package.
Why is this important? Because Varnish fills the same role as the Boost module, except it can handle 1000s of requests per second. Your constrained resources are going to be network and bandwidth. Getting it working well takes a bit of doing, but thanks to PressFlow and support from davidstrauss and DamZ, I've gotten a vanilla system working.
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