Cloud computing offers many advantages and challenges for hosting Drupal sites. Acquia Hosting is a highly available cloud-based hosting platform tuned for Drupal performance and scalability. Acquia Hosting built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), takes advantage of an industry leading cloud-computing platform to provide the highest levels of security, fault-tolerance and operational controls possible in the cloud. This Webinar, featuring Barry Jaspan, Senior Architect at Acquia and Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist Amazon Web Services, discusses how Amazon's Web Services can help Drupal site developers and managers solve common but vexing problems, including scaling. The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) components will be discussed in detail. In addition we will discuss specific best practices for: * Creating a high-performance, high-availability Drupal tuned hosting environment on AWS * Load balancing: Elastic IP vs. Elastic Load Balancing * Handling user-uploaded files with multiple web nodes * Achieving true high-availability with multiple availability zones * Choosing between Amazon Relational Database Service and building it yourself * Configuring and managing your cloud servers

1. BUILDING THE CLOUD
Jeff Barr, Senior Web Services Evangelist
jbarr@amazon.com
@jeEarr

2. G OALS F OR T ODAY
• Introduce you to AWS
• Show you how the pieces fit together
• Provide background for second half of this webinar
• Answer your AWS and cloud compuRng quesRons

3. I NTRODUCING AWS
• AWS = “Amazon Web Services”
• One of our three businesses:
– Online Retail
– Seller Business (Marketplace)
– Web Service Infrastructure Amazon Web
Services
• Pay As You Go Pricing Model Or “AWS” for short…
• Two Levels:
– Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
– Pla_orm as a Service (PaaS)

4. B UILDING THE C LOUD
• Business
• Security
• Presence
• Technical

5. B UILDING THE C LOUD ‐ B USINESS
• Amazon’s Brand Name
• Self‐serve Signup
• User Accounts
• Pay As You Go
• Credit Card Billing

6. B UILDING THE C LOUD ‐ S ECURITY
• Security is Job #1 for Us
• Designed for MulR‐Tenancy
• SAS 70 CerRficaRon
• Security White Paper
– Physical Security
– Logical Security
• Published Best PracRces
• hfp://aws.amazon.com/security

7. B UILDING THE C LOUD ‐ P RESENCE
AWS Regions:
US East (Northern Virginia)
US West (Northern California)
Europe (Dublin)
Asia Pacific (Singapore)
More to come…
AWS CloudFront LocaRons
Ashburn, VA / Dallas, TX / Los Angeles, CA / Miami, FL / Newark, NJ /
Palo Alto, CA / Seafle, WA / St. Louis, MO / Amsterdam / Dublin /
Frankfurt / London / Hong Kong / Tokyo / Singapore / New York

8. BUILDING THE CLOUD ‐ TECHNICAL

9. A MAZON E LASTIC C OMPUTE C LOUD
• Amazon EC2: on‐demand compute power
– Obtain and boot new server instances in minutes
– Scale capacity up or down as needed
– $0.085 per hour and up
• Key features:
– Support for Windows, Linux, and OpenSolaris
– Complete flexibility to install any open source or commercial soqware
– Supports all major web and applicaRon pla_orms
– MulRple Availability Zones
– ElasRc IP Addresses
– ElasRc Block Storage
– ElasRc Load Balancing
– Auto Scaling
– Amazon CloudWatch

10. A MAZON R ELATIONAL D ATABASE S ERVICE (RDS)
• Create a new relaRonal database with one API call
• Offload common administraRve tasks to AWS
• Use exisRng code and tools
• Scale up processing or
storage with one API call
• Recover database using
snapshot or log file
• MySQL 5.1

11. AWS P ACE OF I NNOVATION – 2010
» Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
» RDS SSL Support
with Windows, Extra Large High
» CloudWatch EBS Metrics
Memory Instances
» S3 Console Support
» Amazon S3 Versioning Feature
» Import/Export API
» Consolidated Billing for AWS
» CloudFront HTTPS Support
» Lower pricing for Outbound Data
» CloudFront POP in NY
Transfer
» Singapore Region » CloudFront Price ReducRon
» RDS in Europe » ElasRc MapReduce updates
» ELB sessions
2010
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul
» ??
» Amazon SNS
» ??
» ??
» RDS Console Support
» S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage
» AWS SoluRon Pages » RDS MulR‐AZ
» CloudFront Streaming Logs
» VPC in Europe

12. F INAL T HOUGHTS
• AWS Trends:
– ConRnuous innovaRon
– AddiRonal services
– AddiRonal features
– AddiRonal locaRons
• This is the Rme to learn and start to use the cloud!

13. G ETTING S TARTED W ITH AWS
• Create developer account at hfp://aws.amazon.com
• Download access keys, SDKs, developer tools
• Build and deploy applicaRon
• AWS Blog: hfp://aws.typepad.com

14. Hosting Drupal on AWS
http://acquia.com/resources/
acquia-tv
Barry Jaspan
Senior Architect, Acquia
barry.jaspan@acquia.com
@bjaspan
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

15. Acquia Hosting Overview
• Managed web hosting for Drupal
• High performance, scalability, availability
• Combined infrastructure- and application-level
support from one vendor
• Single or multi-tier
• Load balancers, web nodes, database clusters,
memcached, network filesystems, ...
• One instance, separate instances, or any
combination
• Automated
• We provisioned for a “20M uniques on day one”
customer ... in a few minutes.
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

16. Load balancing
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

17. Load balancing on AWS
• No hardware LB is available
• Round-robin DNS to web nodes is bad for
high-availability
• Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
• CNAME requires http://www.TLD
• Limited flexibility (but now with stickiness!)
• Elastic IP address (EIP) + software LB
• Allows http://TLD
• Only one EIP per server
• We use nginx for LB and Varnish for caching
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

18. Software load balancer
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

19. Shared les
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

20. File sharing on AWS
• Drupal needs a POSIX filesystem for user-
uploaded files
• Elastic Block Store (EBS) is single-instance
• rsync does not scale past N=2 web nodes
• S3FS is worse than useless for this
• Too slow, non-POSIX, unreliable, unsupported
• A network filesystem is required
• NFS?
• More later...
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

21. Basic web stack
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

22. HA load balancer
• Load balancer might fail
• Elastic IP
• Requires a hot spare
• EIP must be reassigned to a hot spare
• Elastic Load Balancer
• For us, can’t talk directly to web nodes
• nginx provides virtual host flexibility, concurrency
protection, etc
• Varnish provides caching
• Also requires a hot spare (or second active
instance)
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

23. HA load balancer with EIP
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

24. HA lesystem
• NFS
• Cannot tolerate server failure
• Not replicated
• DRBD with virtual IP reassignment won’t work
• AFS
• Tolerates server failure
• Not replicated
• GlusterFS
• Replicated and distributed
• GPL, commercially supported, under active dev
• Easy to use, tricky to optimize just right
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

25. HA lesystem with
GlusterFS
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

26. HA database
• Multi-AZ Relational DB Service (RDS)
• Failover takes 3 minutes
• Active/passive master MySQL replication
• Must avoid “split-brain” operation
• All web nodes must fail over simultaneously
• Heartbeat with virtual IP reassignment not possible
• Failover mechanism must itself be HA
• Using MySQL proxy just leads to the same problem
• Requires synchronous app-level failover
• We store db election in GlusterFS
• Any other HA replicated data store would do
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

27. High-availability web stack
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

28. Machine con g
• All these instances need to be built
• Incremental custom AMIs
• Time consuming during development/debugging
• Poor fit for source-code control
• Leads to mystery configurations
• Automated configuration scripts/language
• Incremental updates are simple
• Good fit for source-code control
• Known process from a clean, base AMI
• Combining the two may be best
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

29. Static con g with puppet
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

30. Elasticity
• Elastic scalability means dynamic
configuration
• Balancers: info on all web nodes
• Web nodes (Drupal): info on all db servers
• FS servers: info on all EBS volumes to use
• FS clients: info on all FS servers to use
• All (re-)started instances get a new IP
• EIPs are limited and cost more to use
• All servers need current internal IPs
• Admins need current external IPs
• Requires frequent manual updates, or
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.
automation

31. Dynamic data-driven con g
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

32. Email from AWS
• AWS IPs are on many spam blacklists
• Can’t reliably be used to send mail
• Requires a non-cloud mail server or service
provider
• Note: Jeff tells me this situation has improved
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

33. Colo mail server
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

34. Everything else
• I’ve only talked about cloud-specific issues
• To self-host (anywhere), you also need:
• Backups
• 24x7 monitoring
• Ops staff
• Caffeine
• Ibuprofen
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.

35. Management and ops stack
Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting © 2010 Acquia, Inc.