amazon ec2

I'm happy to announce the 0.6 Alpha release of the Mercury AMI, now including ApacheSolr as the search backend! This is the last piece of major infrastructure we want to integrate into the stack for scalability purposes. You can now move from a single-server install based on Mercury to a best-practice vertically scaled architecture with separate hardware to run front-end cache, application, back-end cache, search and database!

The quickest way to find it is by searching Amazon EC for "Pantheon" or "Mercury". The manifest path for the latest release (in 32bit and 64 bit flavors) is:

• chapter3-storage/PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury-alpha-6.manifest.xml
• chapter3-storage/PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury64-alpha-6.2.manifest.xml (back!)

If you'd like to "roll your own" we've updated the wiki instructions page with a new set of instructions for getting Solr up and running as part of the process. Feel free to improve that documentation, as it's definitely a community process.

This will likely be one of the last releases before we move the project into the Beta phase, at which point we'll be focusing on fine tuning and stability as well as portabilty onto non EC2 systems moreso than new features. If you have ideas for additional things you'd like to see integrated in the stack, please chime in. We're also going to be documenting real-world "how to" use-cases — e.g. "how do I put my existing site on Mercury" in user-friendly detail — so stay tuned for that.

As always, let us know what you think of the release, what you'd like to see in future iterations, and how your experience is in using the stack. There's plenty more to come.

I just installed the EC2 instance of pantheon Aegir. When looking through the mercury press flow stack, it would seem like once running, you would be able to hit the ip of the server and be able to see your drupal install there. I seem to get the error message "The connection has timed out". I logged into the server. apache seems to be running. I went through the README file and got up to renamed the vhost.d file to the elastic IP address as well as changing the servername variable to the IP address. However I still get Problem loading page when trying to get to the install page.

Today I'm glad to announce the latest release in this line of AMI development. This update solves a number of issues and moves us one step closer to a sable beta release. The current AMI ID is ami-c353b2aa, and you can find this AMI by searching for "chapter3" or "mercury" in your AWS console.

For more background information about this project, see my initial g.d.o post and my blog post announcing the initial release.

Below you will find the notes for this release. Also in this post I will include a development roadmap, as well as some more explicit explanation of the techniques I'm using for making the AMI work out of the box.

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.

Sedan sessionen Drupal in the Cloud | Drupalcon Szeged 2008 är jag mycket intresserad av Amazon EC2. Nu i veckan öppnade Amazon upp EC2 Europa vilket gör det hela än intressantare för oss på den här sidan Atlanten.

För en “small” server betalar man US$0,11 per timme i Europa. Det blir knappt US$80 per månad, just nu nästan 640 kr (innan kronan dök i värde var det ca 500 kr). Kostnader för trafik tillkommer förstås men den är helt rörlig och priserna är låga.

En enkel VPS kan man få för halva det priset eller mindre så detta är inget riktigt budgetalternativ. Jämför man med att sätta upp en helt egen server blir det dock billigt tror jag. Tar man med att man slipper betala för reservhårdvara, möjligheten att skala upp till många fler server på några minuter och bara betala för dem de timmar man använder dem etc. så blir priset väldigt attraktivt.

Hello all,
Sorry for cross-posting; but I think people working on different aspects of Drupal may have interest in this idea.

I've submitted a SoC 2007 Drupal proposal on automating the whole process of creating a complete Drupal site with a LAMP stack in a self-contained virtual machine image. A formatted PDF version is here:
http://www.abeharry.info/SoC2007_DrupalAST_FullProposal.pdf
Here is the abstract:

The Drupal automated staging toolkit is a proposed set of code libraries, file schemas and parsers, and code generators, for