Slides from Josh Koenig's "Drupal in the Cloud" presentation at SxSw interactive 2010.

1. Drupal in the Cloud!
Josh Koenig
drupal.org/user/3313
josh@chapterthree.com
www.getpantheon.com
twitter.com/pantheon_drupal
twitter.com/outlandishjosh
Monday, March 15, 2010

2. “The Cloud” Is...
Monday, March 15, 2010

3. 2009’s Top Buzzword
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4. Hand-Waver Hype
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5. “Scaling Silver Bullet”
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6. When something sounds
too good to be true...
It probably is.
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7. Just Say No
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8. “The Cloud” really is...
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9. Hosting!
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10. Specifically, it’s a new
model for hosting.
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11. Traditional hosting
=
Real estate
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12. Most real estate
consumers are
renters.
Few love their
landlord.
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13. Owning comes with
lots of responsibilities
and hidden costs.
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14. Large scale projects
are expensive, slow,
and prone to
setbacks.
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15. “The Cloud”
=
Hosting as service API
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16. On-demand
availability
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17. Usage-based pricing
(usually hourly)
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18. Reliable, reusable
start-states
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19. The cloud is good!
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20. Less waste
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21. More freedom
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22. But not a silver bullet!
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23. Monday, March 15, 2010

24. Performance can vary
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25. Journal of Eivind Uggedal: VPS Performance Comparison
http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
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26. Abstractions aren’t
the same as the real
thing
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27. New tricks to learn
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28. For Entrepreneurs and
Upstarts (like Drupal),
the Cloud is Destiny
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29. Start with pennies,
scale to millions.
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30. Create products
(cheaply).
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31. Grow organically, but
still grow fast.
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32. Be The Center Of Your Own Universe
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33. Should You Host In The
Cloud?
(maybe you already are)
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34. Begin Nuts and Bolts Presentation
• Launch a server in the cloud
• Players in the space
• Practical cloud use-cases
• Dollars and cents
• Cloud architecture howto
• PANTHEON: Drupal in the cloud
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35. Demo: Boot Mercury
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36. (generic)
(no code!)
(limited language support)
Managed Cloud Services (no root)
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37. Most Mature
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38. Hungry Like The Wolf
(a really big wolf)
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39. Small, Brainy, Excellent Global CDN
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40. And More Every Day...
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41. VPS is Becoming Quite Cloudy
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42. Linode
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43. SliceHost (Rackspace)
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44. VPS.net
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45. And More Every Day...
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46. Custom/Private Cloud Services
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47. Cloud Value-Adders...
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48. Cloud/Cluster Management Services
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49. Cross-Cloud Services
(and libcloud.org)
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50. Cloud Tools For Drupal
(shameless plug: getpantheon.com)
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51. What Is It Good For?
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52. Testing / Continuous Integration
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53. Development Infrastructure
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54. Products and Services
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55. High Availability/Enterprise Hosting
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56. Making This Crazy Dream Come True
“social starfish” by Darren Barefoot: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbarefoot/1814873464/
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57. C.R.E.A.M. (part 1)
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58. 24x7x365
infrastructure tends
to be a wash in the
cloud
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59. However: Don’t Underestimate
Opportunity Cost
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60. Easy Savings Are In Traffic Patterns
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61. Burstable = Inexpensive Surge
Protection
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62. Cloud Caveats
• Honest clouds admit they have
downtime. So will the others.
Instances will fail, though not much
more often than real servers.
• Performance can be impacted by
other local activity.
• Virtual disks tend to have relatively
poor I/O performance.
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63. Solutions
• Accept the inevitability of failure.
• Embrace the paradigm of redundancy
and rapid recovery.
• Develop architecture with modular,
replaceable parts.
• Stay fast by minimizing disk/cpu
utilization for menial tasks.
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64. The Cloud in Production
• Monitor your load.
• Spin up more instances (scale
horizontally) as you need more power.
• Add layers (scale vertically) as bottlenecks
emerge.
• Create Images for each piece in your
infrastructure.
• Best Practices To Stay Speedy
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65. Best Practices?
C.R.E.A.M. (pt 2)
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66. High Performance Drupal Architecture
• Front-side caching: Use Pressflow with
Varnish and/or NgineX.
• Opcode cache (APC) keeps your bits hot.
• Memcached helps to minimize queries to
the database.
• Use dedicated, separately-scalable tools
where possible, like ApacheSolr search.
• Architect for vertical scaling by utilizing
all service layers, even if it’s one box.
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67. Comin Atcha!
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68. Technical Info
Mercury is a standardized high
performance stack for Drupal. It
is available in source format, or
(soon) as an on-demand service.
It utilizes the best available
open-source technologies to
make our favorite CMS very fast
and to hold up under large
spikes in traffic.
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69. Vision: From One Box to Cluster
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70. We Have A Dream
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71. Q & A!
josh@chapterthree.com
twitter.com/pantheon_drupal
twitter.com/outlandishjosh
#drupalinthecloud
Monday, March 15, 2010