Talk given at Drupalcamp Arad 2012.

1. DCAMP
Cloud to the rescue
How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud
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2. DCAMP
About me I pity the fool
who doesn’t use
Drupal
Hi, I’m Alexandru Badiu.
I’m a software engineer, amateur game
developer and part time Mister T
impersonator.
Drupal user for 9 years, board member in
Drupal Romania.
I work for Demotix.
Twitter @voidberg
Web ctrlz.ro
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3. DCAMP
1
The cloud
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4. DCAMP
The cloud
To the world
“Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service to a heterogeneous
community of end-recipients” - Wikipedia
To us
“The cloud is just a buzz word meaning quick to set up VPSs when you need them, perhaps have 'unlimited'
storage space and even a CDN if your lucky” - Demotix CTO
Web “2.0”
Servers - Virtual Private Servers
Storage - Lots and lots of data
Delivery - CDNs and other tricks
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5. DCAMP
The promise
‣ New servers anytime
‣ Scale up and down anytime
‣ Unlimited storage
‣ Pay only for what you use
‣ Short / no contracts
‣ Total control
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6. DCAMP
Demotix
‣A quick 2 minute introduction
‣ http://prezi.com/_ugoyxm4qprv/demotixcom-2-
minutes/
‣ Acquired by Corbis a couple of days ago
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7. DCAMP
Demotix numbers
‣ 1.5million+ page views a month
‣ Very very long tale of content
‣ Spikes where we get 100k's views in a single day
‣ 14 GB+ database
‣ 1M+ nodes, even more terms (10M+)
‣ 3-5k new nodes per day
‣ 200GB+ files directory
‣ Some folders have over 750K files
‣ 80% unauthenticated traffic
‣ 6k active users
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8. DCAMP
Demotix before the cloud
‣ 1 Web server
‣ Varnish
‣ Apache, mod_php
‣ 1 Database server
‣ MySQL
‣ 1 Util server
‣ Memcached
‣ Solr
‣ FTP Server
‣ Beanstalk
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9. DCAMP
Previous cloud experience
‣ Started on the cloud
‣ Prototype and alpha built a cloud
‣ Dev environment still on a cloud
‣ Moved off for better support
‣ We needed 24/7 support
‣ Site liked to crash on major Christian holidays
‣ Saw a nice speed bump when we did
‣ Better disk IO
‣ Dedicated hardware
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10. DCAMP
Why go back?
‣ Spikes
‣ Single story spikes
‣ Breaking images of the Oslo bomb story went viral
‣ Our firewall (not webserver) went into melt down
‣ Event based spikes
‣ Royal wedding
‣ Elections
‣ Olympics
‣ Dev = Staging = Production
‣ Flexibility
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11. DCAMP
Dream setup
‣ 1+ Load balancer
‣ Varnish
‣ 3+ Web servers
‣ Nginx, PHP-FPM
‣ 2+ Database servers
‣ MariaDB
‣ 2+ Util server
‣ Memcached
‣ Solr
‣ FTP Server
‣ Beanstalk
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12. DCAMP
Why do it yourself?
Why not pay someone else to figure it out?
‣ Control - SaaS is a blackbox in most cases
‣ Complexity - We did not fit generic solutions
‣ If you can do it, go ahead
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13. DCAMP
2
Challenges
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14. DCAMP
#1 - Disks
Slice ratio (How big is your share?)
‣ Most (but not all) cloud providers slice servers up into equal cpu/
ram/disk space chunks and sell them off.
‣ Some let you add on resources you need, others don't.
‣ Problem for file servers.
Poor disk IO
‣ Are your disks local or over the network?
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15. DCAMP
#2 - Location
Laws
‣ EU has laws about where you can send and store users data.
‣ Your business may not allow for you to store data in the cloud.
Users
‣ Cloud may not be where your users are.
‣ CDNs can help.
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16. DCAMP
#3 - Support
More servers, more problems
‣ Once your past dedicated use servers (web, db etc) you have to
do work on the app to support more servers.
Help
‣ Can you get any? And how fast?
‣ How about at 3am?
‣ On Christmas day
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17. DCAMP
#4 - Total control
You need to be a sysadmin or become one
Servers crash at 3AM
‣ Monitoring systems
‣ Emergency instructions
‣ Disaster recovery
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18. DCAMP
#5 - 1 != 1
Cloud providers differ a LOT
‣ Different slice rations
‣ Different bandwidth allocation methods
‣ Different support packages
‣ Very different performance
Overselling
‣ Happens a lot
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19. DCAMP
3
Benchmarks
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20. DCAMP
Where to start?
Benchmarks
‣ Learn to
benchmark Drupal
‣ Cloudharmony.com
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21. DCAMP
DB benchmarks
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22. DCAMP
Disk/IO benchmarks
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23. DCAMP
Mem/IO benchmarks
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24. DCAMP
CPU benchmarks
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25. DCAMP
Then?
Make sure they can do what you need
‣ CDN?
‣ Storage?
‣ Good support?
‣ Is it going to break the bank?
Try before you buy
‣ If there’s a free testing period, use it
‣ Put as close to a 1:1 copy of your site
Hammer it
‣ AB / Siege test the cache system
‣ Replay your log files with HTTPERF or Jmeter
‣ Monitor the results with Munin/Cacti/NewRelic
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26. DCAMP
4
Storage
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27. DCAMP
Storage
Storage = sites/*/files
More than 1 web server
The slice ratio fails for file servers
Lots of files in a single directory (10k+)
https://www.getpantheon.com/news/inside-
pantheon-valhalla-filesystem
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28. DCAMP
NFS
Server with big data + NFS
Tried, tested, works
Not very exciting
Single point of failure
Depending on cloud you could need a 64 GB RAM
server
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29. DCAMP
API / Gluster
API storage + Fuse (Cloudfuse, s3fs)
Theoretically unlimited storage
Easy CDN
A bit bleeding edge
Gluster FS
Impressive
Tradeoffs that Drupal doesn’t need
Complicated but likely worth it
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30. DCAMP
5
CDNs
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31. DCAMP
The problem with CDNs
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32. DCAMP
Types of CDNs
Push (CloudFiles, Amazon S3)
No redundant traffic
Complex setup
Pull (Lots)
Very easy to setup
Lots of redundant traffic
DNS (Cloudflare / Incapsula)
Takes over your DNS
Does much more (analytics, protection, optimization)
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33. DCAMP
6
What did we do?
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34. DCAMP
What did we do?
We picked Dediserve
http://dediserve.com
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35. DCAMP
What did we do?
NFS Storage
Simple, tried and tested
Using a NFS mount of raid disks used by all webheads
CDN Pull
Very easy to setup
Dediserve’s OnApp CDN
Spread assets over several domains (front end performance)
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36. DCAMP
Our current setup ‣ 1 Load balancer
‣ Varnish
‣ 4 Web servers
‣ Apache, mod_php
‣ 1 Database servers
‣ MariaDB
‣ 1 Util server
‣ Memcached
‣ Solr
‣ FTP Server
‣ Beanstalk
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37. DCAMP
7
Other issues and findings
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38. DCAMP
Lots of files
Close to 1M files in a single directory
Wrote custom module to fix this
Part of the file save hooks it moved the file to a folder structure
based on the filename
Will be released on d.o
Cloudfuse + CDN
Working proof of concept
Uses Rackspace’s cloud files for both storage and CDN
Requires pre-generation of imagecache
Not published yet
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39. DCAMP
What we found
Puppet is awesome
So is any other build automation system
Spinning up new test or production servers is very very easy
Great to setup local dev, stage or merge
url_alias is dog slow on InnoDB
Removing the language conditions speeds it up
Convert term_data’s description to VARCHAR
MySQL won’t use in memory tables if you query TEXT fields
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40. DCAMP
8
Conclusions
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41. DCAMP
Conclusions
The Cloud isn't a magic bullet
Cloud providers differ a LOT
Benchmarking can help differentiate providers
The best benchmark is your own app, with replayed
traffic.
Storage can be complicated
CDNs can give you an easy win
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42. DCAMP
Thanks!
Questions?
Alexandru Badiu.
Twitter @voidberg
Web http://ctrlz.ro
Email andu@ctrlz.ro
D.O http://drupal.org/user/8662
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