Hi, and thanks for the great work for getting AWS AMI's up and running for the public. Im getting ready to move my site from one of my hosts to the cloud, but I have a few questions I have yet to find an answer to with this AMI.
When I launch this ami-554aa33c where do I store my web files, aka /sites/default/files/ /sites/all/* I'm assuming once this image is up I move my sites modules, themes and files over to a EBS volume I mount on this device? Looking /var/www/ i do see this.. How do I when moving stuff over keep my data, so if it gets stopped or accidentally terminated all the work I did doesn't get removed.
Also with RDS available what do I need to do to get this working with Pressflow?
And Lastly with S3 or Cloud Front I would want to store alot of my sites images that users upload and such and make them avail on Cloud front (seems cheaper)
I guess Once im up im not 100% sure what do to next, do I set this up, and clone the ami for my own person.. is their a nice walk thought that I seem to be missing (btw I know how to use aws and the ec2 tools thats not the issue).
Cheers for any pointers..
Comments
It might be better to follow
It might be better to follow the best-practices tutorial in the documents section and roll your own. Those ami's are a bit outdated ... the 1.0 for instance uses an unsupported ubuntu version and requires backporting to keep things up to date. I never could get the 1.1 to work with my setup, but following the install instructions you should be able to spin up your own mercury style server.
For your other questions, I move the web root and the db to their own ebs drives and setup snapshots on them so its always separate from the AMI. I've yet to use RDS so i couldnt tell ya, but mercury does have a tweaked mysql so im not sure where rds comes in compared to how the best-practices for drupal in mercury are setup.
So for your ami creation, you
So for your ami creation, you set up things like lamp, varnish, solr etc , then on the ebs you have your /var/www/sitename so that you can then easly update core, modules, and or files with out having to build a new ami ?
Any reason you haven't used RDS yet? or do you just run one site per ami? I guess my question is do you have several ec2 instances, connecting to one db?
You can easily update the
You can easily update the files on an instance too of course... but having the db and webroot and whatever is preferred, because if the ami goes down you can start over with all your data in tack and just attach those drives to the new ami. You could also do an EBS boot AMI this makes the whole server on an ebs volume should you want system wide snapshots.
There are many free ami's available - you could pick out a linux distro and then add the Mercury best practices to it. Each one of the Mercury concepts, Varnish, Memcache, Pressflow etc has its own software/community you can get help in should you run into trouble. You could also sign up for Pantheon which is sort of mercury as a service plus drupal goodies.
As for the database I've been using one db for all my sites on one single server that I use Aegir to manage the sites, I have a large instance and have never reached max usage on it with 6 live sites and a handful of dev sites... with memcache & varnish the db usage gets a lot of relief.