1. Drupal in the Cloud
by Azhan
Founder/Director S & A Solutions

2. Drupal in the Cloud
> Drupal and S & A Solutions
• S & A Solutions – who?
• doing it with Drupal since 2007
• Over 70 projects in 5 years
• More than 20 clients
• 99% Drupal projects
• We love Drupal (obviously!)

3. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 1 – http://theasiamag.com
• Content publishing of stories from Asia
• Launched in 2010 using Amazon EC2+RDS
• Drupal 6, on shared hosting during development
• Despite performance tuning efforts, still slow pages
"Ok S & A, so what do we do now?"

4. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 1 – http://theasiamag.com
S & A commissioned to do a site performance evaluation
We need to
• Find out what is causing the slow pages
• Find out what server size is suitable
• Decide between single tier or multi-tier
• Provide a solution for short term/future scalability
• Prove with benchmarking test results

5. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 1 – http://theasiamag.com
Drupal and other optimizations done:
• Turned on Boost module, CSS/Javascript aggregation
• Optimized images, custom module SQL queries
• Removed references to missing files/images
Results:
• Reduced page loading times from 8 secs to 5 secs
• average ~ 30-40% improvement
• Apparent network latency stays at 3-4 secs
> Hints on bottleneck in the network, web server, database

6. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 1 – http://theasiamag.com
Network test:
• wget download test >> 132kb/sec (good)
• ping latency hovering 200-300ms
(normal for SG to USA)
Network no longer the suspect
• Apache ab –k -n100 -c1 >> 2-5 secs per page load (SLOW!)
• 70% content errors when ramped up to n=100, c=10
Final suspects:
Web server, MySQL needs more CPU and/or memory

7. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 1 – http://theasiamag.com
Other opportunities in improving performance
• Serve static files using a CDN (> 1GB of static files)
• Load balanced web servers
• Memcached / Varnish
• Reverse proxy eg. Nginx
• Tune & recompile Apache/MySQL for performance
• Allocate more resources to Apache and MySQL (easy)

8. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 1 – http://theasiamag.com
Other opportunities in improving performance
• Serve static files using a CDN (> 1GB of static files)
• Load balanced web servers
• Memcached / Varnish
• Reverse proxy eg. Nginx
• Tune & recompile Apache/MySQL for performance
• Allocate more resources to Apache and MySQL (easy)

9. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 1 – http://theasiamag.com
TheAsiaMag asked for Amazon web services
• US West Virginia availability zone
• mostly worldwide audience
• 4 types of server configurations were tried
• involves a Load balancer, EC2 with EBS, RDS

10. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 1 – http://theasiamag.com
1st run: Load balancer, 2x EC2 micro instances, small RDS
2nd run: Load balancer, 1x LARGE EC2 instance, small RDS
3rd run: Load balancer, 1x small EC2 instance, small RDS
4th run: Load balancer, 1x medium EC2 instance, small RDS
Benchmarking tools used:
• Apache ab
• Drupal Devel module, MySQL slow logs
• Firebug

11. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 1 – http://theasiamag.com
RESULTS of 1st run: Apache ab -n10000 -c10
Load balancer, 2x EC2 micro instances, small RDS
EC2 CPU 100%
EC2 RAM 100% (no swap)
RDS CPU 100%
Apache server dies at a random time within a day
and could not revive itself

12. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 1 – http://theasiamag.com
RESULTS of 2nd run: Apache ab -n10000 -c10
Single LARGE EC2 instance, small RDS
10,000 requests completed in under 20mins
EC2 CPU 5-10%
EC2 RAM 30-50%
RDS CPU <5%
Impressive, but overkill. And expensive!

13. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 1 – http://theasiamag.com
RESULTS of 3rd run: Apache ab -n10000 -c10
Single small EC2 instance, small RDS
10,000 requests completed in 1hr
EC2 CPU 15-20%
EC2 RAM 85%
RDS CPU 50%
Performance is just OK, but cost is within budget!
No need for 4th run.

14. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
• Property listing portal, launched in 2010
• Drupal 5, dedicated server hosting
• In 2011 - slow pages, occasional server deaths
“S & A, what do we do?”

15. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
The problem
• Just 1000+ properties
• 10k page views per month
• Very complex search+filters using native Drupal search
• Real time statistics killing the site
• Watchdog?!!!
First aid
• Identified slow queries, MySQL always using too much RAM
• Had to “kill” watchdog
• Plenty of opportunity for code optimization, but have to wait
• Hardware upgrade to rescue the site first

16. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
• Current hosting at a leading US-based reputable company
• Amazon web services suggested as an alternative

17. Drupal in the Cloud
> Scalability challenges
• Code, database, OS optimizations
• Single, monster server vs multi-tier architecture
• How to handle spikes in traffic/load
• Security, reliability
• Cost for all the fancy setup
• Time to do all that?!
without breaking the bank!
> I know we could do all that with Amazon web services

18. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
Proposed architecture on Amazon web services
• Load balancer
• 2x small EC2 for web server
• 1x small EC2 for hosting static files
• Shared by all web servers via NFS
• 1x LARGE RDS for MySQL database

19. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
Final architecture on Amazon web services
• Load balancer (later, perhaps)
• Single LARGE EC2 for web server + MySQL
Keep it simple!
Building the business case for the move to AWS:
• Benchmarking the AWS setup vs the current site
• AWS setup has identical CPU, double RAM

20. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
Amazon setup vs dedicated server
Current Amazon web services
CPU Dual core AMD 64bit CPU 4 ECUs (Intel Xeon dual core equivalent)
OS 64bit RHEL 4 64bit Ubuntu 11.10
RAM 4GB 7.5GB
Location USA USA (West Virginia)
Average Cost USD 300 per month USD 200 per month
Upgrading “current” to 8GB, RHEL will cost USD700!

21. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
Benchmarking test results comparison
12
11
10
No of requests per second
8
(more is better)
6 Current
AWS
4
4
2
0
Apache ab requests per sec
Benchmarking Tests

22. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
Benchmarking test results comparison
14
12
12
10
Time in secs
8
Current
6 AWS
4.4
4
2
0
Apache ab timing per request
Benchmarking Tests

23. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
Benchmarking test results comparison
2500
2000 1941
1500
Time in ms
Current
1000 AWS
500
102
0
Devel PHP timings on Homepage
Benchmarking Tests

24. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
Benchmarking test results comparison
120
100
100
80
Time in secs
60
Current
AWS
40
20 18
0
Devel PHP timings on Query page
Benchmarking Tests

25. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
Benchmarking test results comparison
6
5.46
5
4
Time in secs
3
Current
AWS
2
1.44
1
0
Firebug network latency
Benchmarking Tests

26. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
Benchmarking test results comparison
70
60
60
50
Time in secs
40
Current
30
AWS
20
20
10
0
Firebug full page loading time
Benchmarking Tests

27. Drupal in the Cloud
> Case Study 2 – http://holidaycube.com
Client is convinced!
(Yeay!!)

28. Drupal in the Cloud
> Why Amazon web services?
No to AWS
• Could easily have been other hosting providers
• Other cloud vendors can address scalability issues
• Getting over the Amazonian barriers
• AWS may be viewed as “difficult” by some

29. Drupal in the Cloud
> Why Amazon web services?
Yes, AWS!
• A platform for benchmarking, server sizing
• Easy and quick to create/kill servers, run tests
• Actually a safe, cheap and controlled means of
hosting your site or application
• Easily spawn additional servers to cater to “high” periods
eg. A product launch lasting 4 weeks
terminate the additional servers after site traffic has died down
You can get really creative designing your architecture

30. Drupal in the Cloud
> Drupal web load balancing
Amazon Load Balancer
Normally a complex setup with traditional hosting,
the AWS Console makes it so easy to set this up in minutes

31. Drupal in the Cloud
> Drupal and memcached
http://drupal.org/project/memcache
Amazon ElastiCache
Normally a complex setup with traditional hosting
the AWS Console makes it so easy to set this up in minutes
if paired with the Drupal memcache module

32. Drupal in the Cloud
> Drupal and CDN
http://drupal.org/project/cdn
http://drupal.org/project/cloudfront
Amazon Cloudfront or S3

33. Drupal in the Cloud
> Drupal and high availability
Amazon multi-Availability Zones for EC2 and RDS

34. Drupal in the Cloud
> Drupal and MySQL
Running MySQL can be done using one of
the following options:
MySQL on Amazon EC2
MySQL on Amazon RDS
Multi-AZ RDS

35. Drupal in the Cloud
> Drupal & Amazon web services
Amazon CloudFormation
“Templates” to quickly deploy a Drupal stack into the cloud

36. Drupal in the Cloud
> Drupal & Amazon web services
It works!

37. Drupal in the Cloud
> Questions?
Email: azhan@snasolutions.com.sg
Website: http://www.snasolutions.com.sg
Thank you!