We are in the process of getting ready to release a game in the next few months, most of all the back-end is handled by drupal and some custom plugins, but we are now looking to move towards the cloud and making sure drupal and the db can handle the traffic.
I have started down the road of googling all over the and of course ran into project mercury / panthon / press flow etc..
I started down the path of setting up a virtual image of cent os on our vm ware box and trying to follow various guides to get apache/php/varnish/apc/pressflow running but well as probably many of you have found out you run into something that doesn't work or the walk though is outdated.
I know their are some ami's out but is their any virtual images I can try that are preset up on my vm ware box?
Also CentOS vs Ubuntu? I like Ubuntu personally but everyone is saying use CentOS with pressflow etc..
The idea is to set up ec2 images for our web server drupal files, s3 for our /sites/default/files location aka where our game bundles will be stored and sent to the clients, not sure about what to do about mysql yet.. since most people have a master and some clone db's and im not sure how this is handled in amazon ..
anyhow just thought I would see what is new, what path I should take or if anyone has created an image i can test locally on vmware?
Comments
Which guides did you use?
Which guides did you use? Those are kind of old but you should still be able to setup most of the ideas manually on your own build. ...I think there is still access to the install scripts stuff over on github https://github.com/boztek/mercury -ive not tested that out yet but its there. Im not sure if there will be a 1.2 guide or if there will be any more example ami's, its been quiet on that front for a long time. I can attest to the best practices though ... my ubuntu server has been great with no issues and its fast.
I'm not sure Mercury is going
I'm not sure Mercury is going to give you dramatic results as it is geared towards performance via intelligent caching. When you are dealing with mostly dynamic (game) content, I think you're going to find Drupal to be fairly slow given any kind of server load. Obviously you'll want to be running an opcode cache such as APC, and MemCache will probably also help -- but I don't think Varnish is going to do a whole lot for your gamers.
It sounds as though you've got all of your game code written, so it may be a bit late for this -- but you may take a look at node.js (I believe there is a newly minted Drupal module providing some level of integration). This sounds like precisely the kind of architecture you'd want to consider for gaming type server logic.
Thanks guys for your
Thanks guys for your response.. Some of our game content bundles will probably be stored in s3/cloudfront, I was just wondering if varnish could cache those aka like it does .jps etc..
I need to get more up to snuff on varnish, I have my personal sites that are set up to run it but it was more of just following a guide vs completely understanding what all it can do ..
short answer: yes
Varnish can cache any file object like an S3 or CDN would. It won't be geographically distributed, but it'll deliver it as fast as your network connection allows. PHK has a great presentation on how he set up 3 varnish boxes to serve terrabytes of training/promo videos for the USMC in just a couple days. Just be sure you have enough cache space. ;)
https://pantheon.io | http://www.chapterthree.com | https://www.outlandishjosh.com
Sweet.... I bet that was cool
Sweet.... I bet that was cool to setup.
Would he need varnish at all for the bundles if hes using the amazon cdn?
Source?
Is there a link to these videos? I'd be highly interested in giving them a look-see.