rackspace

Hi All,

Wondering if anyone has any experience/opinions on Pantheon vs. Rackspace managed cloud for running high performance Drupal?

My initial thoughts are that Pantheon probably offers the superior developer experience for Drupalers, but Rackspace likely has more flexibility in terms of backend configuration at a server level for real experts (as well as being slightly cheaper?).

Unfortunately for me, Pantheon doesn't yet have servers in Australia although I'm told this is in their long term expansion plans. I can use the local CDN to serve statics at least.

As some of you may have seen, we've officially announced the creation of Pantheon Systems, Inc and our plans to deliver a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution for Drupal. We're super-excited about this, and hope to solve a lot of the hard problems that surround the Drupal space in the next year.

However, it's not appropriate for a company to have a Drupal group, and the open-source work on this project continues with Pantheon Systems as a contributor. As such, we've decided to restore the group name to the original "Mercury".

Updates to the open-source/DIY script for setting up the Mercury stack will be coming in the next few weeks, as we work with Boztek and others to get something stable. After that we can start to think about new StackScripts for Linode, AMI's for EC2, and possibly a VirtuualBox image.

Are there other places you'd like to see Mercury available? Other questions you have about the transition? Feel free to post questions here and I'll do my best to answer.

I've tried to go through the groups and forums to glean as much information as I could prior to posting this. I fall into the category of someone who is fairly familiar with drupal and mildly familiar with server setups. There is a wealth information on Performance and tuning, but it leaves the novice without a clear path of how to scale. I though I would post my setup here along with my confusion, in hopes that it will help other individuals in the same boat.

My Current Setup
I currently have 400K nodes and 100 users
I hope to be able to scale to 100k + users 5M Nodes

OpenPublish is a complex, large Drupal distribution that (due to its large code-base) has higher minimal hardware requirements than bare-bones Drupal. Because of this OpenPublish is not officially supported on the shared hosting environments (even though some of our crafty users, have still managed to run it on some shared hosts :)).

Rackspace Hosting has begun offering meeting space to local Open Source project groups in the San Antonio area. As a recent Racker, I have inquired and been informed that it may be possible for us to meet at Rackspace if we are interested in doing so.

This would likely be at the Castle location (I35 and Walzem, old Windsor Park Mall). As it would require some coordination I would like to find out what the interest level is in having our monthly meeting at this location.

I followed the step-by-step instructions greg so kindly posted, and added a few annotations where the install seemed to take a really long time without progress reports from Linux.

This was a plain Rackspace instantiation on Lucid Lynx.

Greg, thanks for the great job!

Couple of questions:

1. I seemed to need to run this command twice: sudo bcfg2 -vqed. It just hangs after the first install, it seems. Have others reported that?
2. I needed to manually set up the mySQL database. Perhaps related to #1 above, perhaps not.

Just a heads up; as we move towards more and more stable builds of the Mercury stack, we are starting to look at deploying it on other infrastructure besides EC2. This week, we set it up and tuned for a modest (512MB of ram) VPS. These tests were successful. We were able to simulate a mix of non-cached traffic along side the simple ApacheBench battering, and the system held up well, even without gigabytes of ram to support it.