Drupal in the Cloud - Research Paper

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dasjo's picture

hi,

i'm currently researching different drupal cloud hosting technologies for a paper for university.

attached an initial overview of the paper's contents as pdf presentation and would like to know if you have any remarks to such a paper.

  • which topics would you like to know about?
  • can you think about good metrics in order to compare SaaS solutions like Drupal Gardens and Buzzr or PaaS solutions like Pantheon, DevCloud and Microsoft Azure?
  • more input welcome

thanks for your replies, i'll keep this post updated as the paper progresses.

AttachmentSize
Drupal in the Cloud.pdf280.38 KB

Comments

The range

Oceanman's picture

It would be useful to know what level of traffic in terms of page views or data transfer or whatever measurable and comparable unit you can think of so we can decide what level of services are useful or needed. I never see a obvious comparable metric between the SaaS solutions with comparison to price. Some benchmarks would be useful to compare products. This benchmark would be separate from additional support and service.

Aegir Project

ergonlogic's picture

You should check out http://aegirproject.org. While not specifically targeting cloud services, it provides a Drupal-based PaaS layer. A couple of contributors/maintainers have been working on cloud-oriented scripts:

More SaaS

joshk's picture

There are several other SaaS options emerging, though they foreground Drupal a bit less. I'll try and dig up a few links for you, but that seems to be a very hot space lately.

Drupal SaaS for organic food companies

aruna.kulatunga's picture

We offer a very specific SaaS for the organic foods industry with Drupal-Pressflow, MySql - Percona and the rest of the Mercury stack, running in Amazon. With some custom modules thrown in. All the functionalities of the whole Drupal stack along with the custom modules are available for all the clients, and by using the domain access module, also somewhat customised, the clients are able to decide what functions they need or not need. The theme layer is completely customizable - each client can give us what ever theme they want to have. In addition to the mercury stack, we also include new -relic monitoring, Amazon RDS, Amazon Cloudfront (using the CDN module) and code / database backups to the Amazon S3 twice daily. We dont have a website! Contact me directly if you like to know why the solution is only for Organic Food companies.

Indeed... Amazon "do it

Macronomicus's picture

Indeed... Amazon "do it yourself" is quite a pleasure to work with using the Mercury stack. I use Aegir in the mix too for all its goodies.

Drupal on Windows Azure

craigkitterman's picture

Hi dasjo, another option to explore for this is Windows Azure. Currently we are working hard with the Drupal Community to provide great support for Drupal in Windows Azure. I have a video that demonstrates how to use the Windows Azure Companion tool to install drupal in Windows Azure in minutes - http://bit.ly/dNzJ05. Work is ongoing to make this experience even simpler and to support full scale out and high-performance configurations. Ping me on twitter if I can help you anymore with this @craigkitterman

--
Craig Kitterman, Sr. Tech Ambassador, Microsoft
@craigkitterman

Might sound strange..

rjbrown99's picture

It might sound like a strange request to MS, but I'd actually like to use Azure... provided I could run Linux on it. My orchestration framework and app (as well as a number of underpinnings) are tied to a Linux platform. I hope this is something in the works for folks who are either all Linux or have a need for a mixed Linux+MS environment.

Auzre support

craigkitterman's picture

@rjbrown99, Windows Azure does not currently support Linux. What are the pieces that are tied to Linux in your app/framework? It may be possible to get them to run

--
Craig Kitterman, Sr. Tech Ambassador, Microsoft
@craigkitterman

Thanks

rjbrown99's picture

Thanks for the reply. In general the entire stack is tied to Linux and has been built and optimized for it. This includes a significant orchestration framework for system management and performance as well as a number of required components. I understand that it is technically possible to move some of that to Windows, I just would have no interest in doing it as it's not going to add value but would otherwise introduce risk and effort.

What would be nice is the ability to spin up Linux VMs in Azure. This would place the offering more on par with a number of the other cloud providers. I'm not opposed at all to using MS as a cloud provider, it just needs to support our OS of choice.

Soapbox

rjbrown99's picture

While I'm on my soapbox, I'd also love to see the current release version of Internet Explorer both backported to older versions of Windows (XP!) as well as to other platforms, namely Mac and Linux. I realize you likely have little to no control over that request, but I thought I'd put it out there. It ties back to the same reason I want Linux on the Azure cloud - you guys at MS are doing some very interesting things and churning out some great work, but the assumption that everyone runs Windows as the base OS needs to change. I'll put it this way - if Azure or IE were owned by a separate company from MS with the same people and same funding, I maintain that there's no way it wouldn't have broader OS support already.

Last request - Windows 7 support on Azure. For those of us who develop web applications and have a need to test them with IE, it would be very nice to spin up a Windows 7 VM in the cloud for that purpose. Again, this works around the issue of not having IE support on a different OS. To date I'm using Windows Server 2008 + IE9 for this purpose but it would be an improvement to use it with IE7.

Thanks for participating in Drupal and in the forums, the fact that you are here and having a dialog shows commitment to the community. I definitely appreciate it.

I second the increase in

rye12111's picture

I second the increase in online file storage needs across platforms for the Drupal Cloud, but understand there are limitations to doing so. After watching the Windows Azure video, I think there is hope for functionality across older or less popular(from a volume standpoint) platforms. If there is a call to expand the availability of compatible OS from more people like rjbrown, one would think this would dictate exploring the implementation of such options.

OS of Choice

craigkitterman's picture

I understand your constraint and appreciate your feedback! At this time Windows Azure doesn't support Linux VMs. If you have any other questions about it please feel free to let me know!

--
Craig Kitterman, Sr. Tech Ambassador, Microsoft
@craigkitterman

That's unfortunate...

patcon's picture

That's unfortunate...

hi all, thanks for your

dasjo's picture

hi all, thanks for your suggestions regarding drupal in the cloud!

i just have to pause working on this because i'm busy doing other stuff but there are good chances i will get back to the topic in fall 2011. will keep you updated if i have anything to tell.

regards

Just sent the PDF to my

patcon's picture

Just sent the PDF to my kindle and I'll try to give it a read later :)

dotcloud.com

doka's picture

Check http://www.dotcloud.com/, as well!

Doka

Drupal + Azure

Sree's picture

Hello everyone,

Currently I am working on providing a solution on SQL Azure with Drupal.I need to authenticate via drupal from Azure, save/retrieve data to/from Azure, present the data to web, ipad etc

I would like to understand the areas where in this combination would become painful.

Thanks,
Sree

Sree

Packaging & Deployment

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