IT STARTED WITH A KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN

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2 IT STARTED WITH A KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN Wild success, raised much more than expected! Attracted a lot of traffic to the website Shared hosting provider told us we were using too much CPU After warnings, provider cut our service for 24 hours We needed an alternative. Quickly!

3 RESCUED BY DRUPAL PLANET Just before that happened, I flagged a blog posting by Randall Knutson I ended up not following his recipe exactly

4 WHAT I WILL COVER Choosing a provider Creating a server in AWS Choosing an operating system Installing and configuring the software stack on Ubuntu

5 DEFINITIONS Virtualisation Partitioning a large physical resource in such a way that a user of a virtual partition appears to have full access to and control of a smaller physical resource. Computer CPU + Memory Storage and much more, outside the scope of this discussion VPS Virtual Private Server AWS Amazon Web Services

6 PROVIDERS Acquia Drupal specialists, value add layered on AWS AWS (Amazon Web Services) datacenter in Singapore Softlayer datacenter in Singapore Azure (Microsoft) Windows, datacenter in Singapore Rackspace many more Decision criteria include Pricing Functionality Performance: CPU & Memory Service Flexibility & Scaling Performance: Storage IOPS Location Reputation & Reliability Performance: Network and Internet

7 WHAT WE DECIDED We ended up choosing a cheap provider, local to my friend s business and home A2 Hosting

8 AWS AMAZON WEB SERVICES Amazon provide a number of different virtualisation services via the web The base virtual computing service is EC2 or Elastic Cloud Compute Can create configurations from basic up to multiple load-balanced servers A basic EC2 instance can service a moderately loaded Drupal site costs around US$30 / SG$40 per month the first month should be free Getting started documentation

9 CREATING A VPS WITH AWS Sign up to AWS at have your credit card ready! Go to the EC2 console at Choose a region by price (USA regions can be slightly cheaper); or by location (close to users for performance or legal reasons) Click on the Launch Instance button Name the virtual server (important if you will have multiple servers) Create (or re-use) an SSH key pair to allow you to login to the server Choose the base operating system image (the Launch Configuration) Click Continue Optionally click Edit Details for advanced settings Click Launch

10 EC2 CREATE INSTANCE

11 EC2 CREATE INSTANCE

12 YOUR NEW VIRTUAL SERVER A short while later (half a minute), your new server should be up and running. More to do, more to do Set up and assign a fire-wall policy, through Security Groups If you want a publicly accessible server, create and assign an Elastic IPs address If you want additional disks, create and assign volume(s) in Elastic Block Store Connect to the new server, using SSH and the Key Pair generated earlier Install the additional packages and configure services

13 CHOOSING AN OPERATING SYSTEM Ubuntu Desktop and Server variants LTS (long term support) or semi-annual upgrades Based on Debian Free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Paid support Reputation for high technical excellence SUSE Enterprise Linux Server Paid support Windows Paid Licensing and Support Not the usual webstack for Drupal CENTOS Based on RHEL from Red Hat Spotty record for timely releases Free A possibility for AWS is an AMI (Amazon Machine Image), which is a pre-built operating system and applications stack, such as BitNami Drupal

14 AMI PRE-CONFIGURED APPLICATION STACKS

15 SETTING UP AN UBUNTU SERVER BASICS Command apt-get update Explanation Updates the list of available software packages apt-get upgrade Upgrades all installed packages to latest versions, particularly security releases The above two commands should be run in sequence as the first thing when you first login to the server. Thereafter, run again about once a week to ensure that the needed security updates are applied in a timely fashion. I haven t yet found a way to automate this. Some package upgrades will require a server reboot.

16 SETTING UP AN UBUNTU SERVER BASICS 2 Command Explanation apt-get install <package-name> Install a software package. If a package depends on other packages, then the system will prompt to confirm whether to download and install both the requested package and also the additional dependencies You may be asked additional questions during the installation of some packages. For example, the new root password for MySQL apt-get install <p1> <p2> <p3> Install a list of packages

17 UBUNTU LAMP STACK PACKAGES Package Description Version apache2 Apache webserver mysql-client MySQL database client software mysql-server MySQL database server software libapache2-mod-php5 PHP in Apache php5-cli PHP command line php5-mysql memcached MySQL library for PHP Memory cache server PERFORMANCE 64Mb should be more than enough for a small site drush Drupal command line utilities 4.5

18 ADVICE: SETTING UP AN UBUNTU SERVER Try to locate Ubuntu packages rather than installing software from other sources Installing from other sources may compromise your ability to cleanly upgrade the operating system in future, with potential security implications Exceptions: Drupal and other web-facing packages written in scripting languages Try to avoid directly updating the settings files created by Ubuntu For major packages, Ubuntu provides simple ways to safely override settings Directly updating settings files may compromise your ability to cleanly upgrade the operating system in future, possibly leading to your important changed settings being lost during an upgrade

19 UBUNTU POSSIBLE PACKAGES - 1 Package Description php5-curl Files via internet library php5-gd Graphics library php5-geoip IP geography library php5-imagick Graphics library php5-mcrypt Encryption library php5-memcache Memory cache library PERFORMANCE php5-memcached Memory cache library PERFORMANCE php-apc Keeps 'compiled' php in memory PERFORMANCE

20 UBUNTU POSSIBLE PACKAGES - 2 Package awstats curl diff geoip-database git less patch Description Webserver statistics - requires manual configuration http utilities Comparison utilities Database linking ip addresses to countries Version control software Tool for looking through logs Software management utility, part of a VCS

21 UBUNTU POSSIBLE PACKAGES - 3 Package Description phpmyadmin Web front end to manage MySQL databases php-pear Tool to install the PEAR and PECL libraries for PHP unzip File compression management vim Programmers editor webalizer Webserver statistics needs manual setup wget Tools to get files via the internet NOTES: The listed packages are hints, some of which you will not need. You may need many more packages depending on your requirements!

22 PHP Create files with settings overrides in /etc/php5/conf.d Typical PHP overrides exact values depend on your requirements upload_max_filesize = 4M memory_limit = 256M include_path = ".:/usr/share/php APC settings apc.shm_size = 64M apc.apc.stat = 0 ; add 48-64M per additional Drupal site Memcache settings memcache.hash_strategy="consistent"

23 APACHE Enable modules by adding symbolic links in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled to the required file(s) from /etc/apache2/mods-available There may be 2 settings files for 1 module: eg. alias.load and alias.conf Remove unwanted modules by removing the link(s) in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled Create your site definitions in /etc/apache2/sites-available and enable the site by creating a symbolic link in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled Particularly useful when creating several virtual hosts Create files with settings overrides in /etc/apache2/conf.d

24 NEARLY THERE Install uploadprogress; type the following commands pecl install uploadprogress echo 'extension=uploadprogress.so' > /etc/php5/conf.d/uploadprogress.ini I haven t found an Ubuntu package for this The 2 nd line is an example of how to cleanly set up a PHP override Reboot the server Start setting up Drupal in the default location of /var/www After Drupal is set up and confirmed working

25 ENABLE MEMCACHE Drupal 6: add the following lines to sites/default/settings.php $conf['cache_inc'] = 'sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.inc'; $conf['memcache_key_prefix'] = 'something_unique'; Drupal 7: add the following lines to sites/default/settings.php $conf['cache_backends'][] = 'sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.inc'; $conf['cache_default_class'] = 'MemCacheDrupal'; $conf['memcache_key_prefix'] = 'something_unique'; Only important if you are hosting multiple sites

26 WEB ADMINISTRATION Webmin Not packaged Moderately complex to install More focused on server administration ISPConfig Not packaged Difficult to work out and install all dependencies Very complex to install, required a lot of research and hand editing to complete Easier to use for common tasks, such as to create virtualised and websites within the virtual server

27 BACK-UPS I have yet to do this correctly! I am currently only backing up database and keeping the backups on the virtual server! Drupal Planet and Randall Knutson to the rescue again backup-script-drupal

28 QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION