High Performance Drupal Meetup at Droplabs on June 5, 2012

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christefano's picture
Start: 
2012-06-05 18:00 - 21:00 America/Los_Angeles
Organizers: 
Event type: 
User group meeting

The High Performance Drupal meetup is meeting again on the 1st Tuesday of the month. Please join us at Droplabs, a Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles, on June 5, 2012.

At this meetup we are having a featured presentation on AWS CloudFormation and Services and a Roundtable Discussion and Demo focusing on Drush.

Our meetups follow a basic format and start off with Drupal news and announcements, local job announcements, breakout sessions, raffle prizes and full-length presentations.

As always, we'll also have community Q&A, during which time anyone in attendance can ask questions, divine answers from the crowd and give brief, 5-10 minute-long presentations known as lightning talks. We'll finish off the night with more networking and a Drupal After Dark at 9:00pm.

Exaltation of Larks - Expert Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training The projector and raffle prizes for this event are being provided by Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training company with a team of Drupal experts in Los Angeles. Follow us at @LarksLA to learn more about our Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training services.

About High Performance Drupal

What is the High Performance Drupal meetup about? The "high performance" part of the name is a catch-all to describe Drupal scalability, performance and benchmarking but we also discuss hosting, infrastructure, deployment, monitoring and highly repeatable processes. Also, this meetup has been held at coffeeshops in the past and the addition of caffeine makes our meetings feel as if they go faster and faster as the night goes on.

This is an meetup that focuses exclusively on advanced topics and there will not be a Users Helping Users portion to the evening.

For any changes to our agenda, stay tuned to this meetup announcement or click the Sign up button below (or both!) to be notified when the agenda has been updated.

What to bring

Just bring your laptop, your business cards or whatever else you need. You're also welcome to bring some light food, sodas or beers to share with others at the meetup.

Please note that our guest wireless network is limited to 1Mb per client, so bring your MiFi router or a phone you can tether with if for some reason you need a lot of bandwidth. Access to our high-speed network is included with a Droplabs membership.

Agenda

   6:00pm
   Coworking and Networking
   Projector and Tables / Chairs Setup

   7:00pm
   News and Upcoming Events
   Breakout Sessions

   8:00pm
   Raffle Prizes!
   Featured Presentation: AWS Cloudformation and Services
   Roundtable Discussion and Demo: Drush

   9:00pm
   Wrap-up, Clean-up and Close-up
   Drupal After Dark and more networking

Join us on Twitter, Google+ and IRC!

During the meetup, several of us will be in the regional #drupal-la channel on IRC and the Downtown Drupal hangout on Google+ and all are welcome to join us. The event organizers will also be monitoring Twitter for feedback and questions that mention @DowntownDrupal.

Breakout Sessions

We have several spaces available for breakout sessions. This is an opportunity for a open, multi-track format where we break into groups and discuss a variety of topics, such as high performance hardware (SSDs, SSL accelerators, etc.), monitoring and alerts, hosting and infrastructure, and so on.

Each breakout session is led by a volunteer who picks the topic, picks the space and can optionally report back to the larger group in the form of an announcement or lightning talk.

Featured Presentations

Steve Rifkin (@steverifkin) of Exaltation of Larks (@LarksLA) will be providing a sneak preview of his DrupalCamp LA presentation on AWS Cloudformation and Services. It is essentially a follow-up to the Chef presentation that he and Craig McEldowney (@ccmcnerdy) gave at the High Performance Drupal meetup on March 6, 2012.

Roundtable Discussion and Demo: Drush

We will also have a roundtable discussion and demo of Drush and its powerful rsync and sql-sync features.

Raffle prizes! Collect them all! Must be present to win!

Our raffle prizes often include discount codes, magazines, DVDs and books. We are always grateful to our sponsors for their continued support. If you have any items you'd like to donate to the raffle, please contact any of the organizers at the meetup.

Drupal After Dark

Even if you can't make it to the meetup, you're welcome to join us for a Drupal After Dark. After we wrap up the meeting and clean up, a group of us will go to a nearby restaurant or pub. One time we had beers and a bonfire and were serenaded by Skrillex. We've also gone to a variety of other locations, including Barbara's at The Brewery (at 620 Moulton Ave., just a 5 minute walk away) and Carnitas Michoacan (on 1901 N. Broadway, just a 5 minute drive away).

Google Map

Location and directions

   Droplabs
   651 Clover St.
   Los Angeles, CA 90031

Droplabs is in the Mission Junction neighborhood of Los Angeles at Big Art Labs, just 1 mile down Main St. from Philippes (the first-ever venue for LA Drupal meetups!) and Union Station. We're one block west of The Brewery, the largest live-and-work artists' colony in the world.

Free parking in our large parking lot is first-come, first-served. After parking in the lot, follow the yellow signs that point to Droplabs. (If our lot is full, you can park for free on Clover St.)

Droplabs is a brief walk from the Main St. / Lamar St. stop on the the Metro Local 76 bus line. This is also the Lincoln Heights / Chinatown DASH stop.

To carpool or catch the Droplabs shuttle from Union Station, post below in the comments.

About Droplabs

Droplabs Los Angeles Droplabs is a collaborative Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles. Created in 2011 by Drupal community members for the Drupal community, we are focused on serving the greater LA Drupal community, enriching the Drupal skills and lives of its members, and bringing joy to our Drupal practice. Our founders represent several local area businesses that have deep roots in the Drupal and open source communities.

We've been open to the public since May, 2011, and the use of our equipment and facilities, including conference room, tables and chairs, is free until our official launch. See http://groups.drupal.org/node/145934 for more details about our open beta period and http://droplabs.net/prices for our list of free amenities and member perks, including our high-speed WiFi, an espresso machine, printer and scanner services, and more.

Droplabs is the host of the monthly Downtown LA Drupal meetups, LA Drupal's weekly Pro Drupal 7 Development book study group and special events including the Varnish 3 Release Party, a Leave GoDaddy Day workshop and LA Drupal's job fairs. To learn more about Droplabs, follow @Droplabs on Twitter, sign up at Meetup.com/Droplabs or like DroplabsLA on Facebook!

About Downtown Los Angeles Drupal

Downtown Los Angeles is one of the most active areas for Drupal in Los Angeles and LA County. We've been meeting regularly on the 3rd Tuesday of every month since early 2010 and now schedule up to 4 regular meetups a month and occasional trainings and social gatherings. Downtown LA Drupal members also produce special events, code sprints, and the annual Drupal Design Camp LA conference

Attending Drupal events in and around Downtown Los Angeles is one of the best ways to meet and talk with other Drupaleros and we encourage you to attend as many meetings and special events as you'd like. Whether it's to find solutions to problems you've been having, sharing something you've learned or just meeting interesting like-minded people, the Downtown LA Drupal events are an essential resource for Drupal professionals and hobbyists alike.

If you aren't already a member of Downtown Los Angeles Drupal, it's easy to join our community. Our calendar of events is on our "Events" tab on our home page at http://groups.drupal.org/dtla

Comments

Please note that this meetup

christefano's picture

Please note that this meetup has been moved up by a half hour. Droplabs will be open earlier at 6pm for coworking and networking, but the meetup now officially begins at 7pm.

Is there a presentation that

christefano's picture

Is there a presentation that anyone would like to give or see given?

We're soliciting speakers for this meetup, whether they be in-person (like rjbrown99's excellent presentation on NewRelic) or remotely via our Google+ hangout (like mikeytown2's sweet presentation on HTTPRL).

Thanks

rjbrown99's picture

Thanks for the kind words christefano :) I won't be able to make this one but maybe next month. Hope you have a nice round of presentations for June and I'll keep an eye out for the video.

AWS Cloudformation and Services

stevenator's picture

In light of this being the high perf meet up, I'd like to propose a session on how I've been deploying Drupal sites using Chef and AWS Cloudformation to provision resources in the Amazon Cloud to run my Drupal sites. It is essentially a followup to the Chef presentation that @craigmc and I did at the HP meet up 3 months ago. This would be a warm up for my DCLA session and I would appreciate the practice in front of people and would make this a quick presentation and open up for Q/A as I believe people will have a ton of questions about what AWS offers and why some of the choices were made to provision resources in this manner.

This isn't Drupal specific however so I put it out there as a warning. This is the same request that I posted for the Pasadena meetup.

what say you HP community?

Syncing live site to dev.

Tony-Mac's picture

I would like to hear a discussion on some of the ideas mentioned below.

From a thread on support@drupal.org.
"Hi. I am pondering the best way to modify and test my site without corrupting my live site. Currently, I ftp all of the files and db tables to my local computer and use MAMP to run my development site. But, since my live site is changing every day from users creating accounts, etc, how should I set this up so that when I upload my development site to the live one, it stays current?"

This question started a long and very interesting discussion. Some of the answers were:

  1. drush sql-sync and drush rsync are your friends.

  2. this is an age-old drupal question, and there are many different solutions. The main problem is that site configuration is stored in the db alongside site content.
    Option A:
    Use modules like Features and Strongarm to get as much of your configuration into code as possible. This can then be versioned and pushed to new servers without touching the db.
    Option B:
    Use something like Backup and Migrate to only overwrite certain tables.
    Option C:
    Use Pantheon hosting and their slick UI tools. ;)

  3. Option D: Use the Feeds module to pull down the new / modified stuff.
    I'm not sure how you get files that are not fielded.

  4. Assuming that you are keeping your codebases pretty current local and remote and it is mostly a database synching challenge, here is a screencast that shows a technique that I have used for years to work with local-sandbox and public-remote:
    http://www.sohodojo.biz/sqlyog
    I use a slick app called SQLyog -- there is a free version and a paid
    version. I've had the paid version for years and can't live without it. I
    believe the free/community version can do the technique I show in the
    webcast but I am not totally sure as I don't use that version.
    I know lots of folks want a free tool and/or drush to do similar things. I
    just find that the multi-copy tactic I use as shown in the webcast has
    served me well, especially when you want to roll back and forth both within your local dev box and your public server.

  5. Thanks for the info. I use Navicat, which I like and seems to have much of the same functionality as SQLyog.

6.Just wanted to through my two cents in: That was a fantastic look into one approach for sure. Thanks for sharing. I agree it would be a nice attempt to get a drush'ed version of this, some how, but even if you don't use SQLyog (or anything else) the set up that you had was interesting as well.
It would be a wonderful presentation idea for an upcoming Drupal session - I know there's plenty of Drupal developers that struggle with this.

Agenda has been updated

christefano's picture

Thanks for your patience, everyone. The agenda has been updated to include Steve's presentation on AWS and a roundtable discussion and impromtu demo of Drush (rsync, sql-sync, etc.).

If you aren't able to attend the meetup in person, please feel welcome to join our Google+ Hangout at https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/extras/DowntownDrupal

Sorry, everyone. The Google+

christefano's picture

Sorry, everyone. The Google+ Hangout isn't working at a predictable URL any longer. We'll be evaluating a different video screensharing tool for next time.

Slides for tonights meetup

stevenator's picture

Hey everyone. Thanks for coming out and listening to what I hope was an interesting topic. I have posted the slides and they can be viewed here:

http://www.slideshare.net/stevenator/aws-cloudformation-and-an-hour-of-a...

Please remember to attend DCLA for the longer and more polished presentation on both Chef and AWS Cloudformation