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Challenges of hosting Drupal on AWS

Day: 
Tuesday
Time: 
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Room: 
309 Microsoft

Presented by

Barry Jaspan (bjaspan)
Acquia
Under the HoodUnder the Hood
Technical details: Study servers, Drupal core, module building, and more.

Cloud computing offers many advantages for hosting Drupal sites but also presents several unique challenges. This talk will discuss specific issues we've encountered while building Acquia Hosting and Drupal Gardens on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and how we address them. Topics will include:

* Load balancing: Elastic IP vs. Elastic Load Balancing
* Handling user-uploaded files with multiple web nodes
* Achieving true high-availability with multiple availability zones
* Coping with variable CPU, disk, and network performance
* Choosing between Amazon Relational Database Service and building it yourself

Experience: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert
Industry: education, entertainment, library, marketing, media, non-profit

Are there example sites that are successfully using Cloud Computing?

The slides for this talk in PDF format are available at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1969857/Hosting%20Drupal%20on%20AWS.pdf.

Is the glusterfs master a single point of failure?

There is no "glusterfs master." We define a glusterfs volume (via a config file in /etc) replicated across two servers. All glusterfs clients mount that volume, so they talk to both servers simultaneously. Either server can go down and all clients stay up talking to the other server. When the down server comes back, inconsistencies across the servers are "self-healed" by whichever client first tries to access the inconsistent file.