Drupal Cloud to the rescue? Servers, Files, CDNs and Fun!

Cloud to the rescue?
Servers, Files, CDNs and Fun
Questions!

Alex McFadyen, CTO

drupal.org : a_c_m || drupal.org/user/195063
email : alex@demotix.com
twitter : @a_c_m

Introduction : Demotix.com

Demotix.com
A two minute (or less) introduction

http://prezi.com/_ugoyxm4qprv/demotixcom-2-minutes/

Drupal Developer Days – Barcelona June 16th 2012
ALEX McFADYEN | alex@demotix.com | @a_c_m

Introduction : Demotix.com
Some 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
– Oh how I love Varnish
●
14GB+ database
●
750,000+ nodes, even more terms
●
3-7k new nodes per day

All running from 3 “real” servers. 1 Web, 1 DB, 1 Util.
(Having moved “out” of the cloud 3 years ago)


Introduction : Why care?

Why not just pay for it to be someone else’s
problem?

●
Control (you NEED it)
●
Complexity (doesn't fit generic solutions)
●
Policy

●
If you can. Do.


Introduction : “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”
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

To me (a Drupal dev)
“The cloud is just a buzz word meaning quick to set up VPSs,
perhaps 'unlimited' storage space and even a CDN if your lucky”
- Me, just now.


Introduction : “The Cloud”
3 parts we were interested in

Power = Virtual Private Servers
Storage = Disks. Big ones.
Delivery = CDNs and other tricks


Power : Why VPSs rock

@ New servers anytime
@ Scale up and down anytime
@ Short/no contracts
@ Total control (I Y Drush, root access, etc)
@ Cheap !


Power : Why VPSs don't

@ Total control (I Y Drush, root access, etc)

“With great power comes great responsibility”
- Uncle Ben

●
You always secretly wanted be a sysadmin right?
●
You want to be woken up at 3am if it goes wrong?
●
root@server:~# rm -rf /



@ Location (Where did I just put that data?)

●
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.
●
Cloud may not be where your users are.



@ Slices (How big is your share?)

●
Most (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.

@ Poor disk IO
●
Are your disks local or over the network?


@ 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.
See last session “How to sleep without the server-crash-fear
(High Availability and High Performance Hosting for Drupal)”

@ Support
●
Do you have any?
●
How about at 3am?
●
On Christmas day



@ Bad neighbours & overselling
●
Starts out great, then reddit moves in next door.

@ Cloud A != Cloud B
●
Disks, CPU/Ram/Disk ratio, network speed, location,
management systems etc


Power : What to do?
@ Benchmarks
●
Drupal benchmark? Omega8.cc Room today at 4pm.
●
http://cloudharmony.com cpu/ram/disk/web/db


Power : What to do?
@ Try before you buy
●
Some companies will give you a free week.
●
Put as close as you can 1:1 copy of your current site on
it and...

@ Test, test and test some more
●
AB / Siege test your caching system.
●
Instead replay your log files with HTTPERF or Jmeter.
●
Monitor the results with Munin/Cacti/Newrelic.


Power : Review
Why VPS rock Why they don't
@ New servers anytime
@ Total control
@ Scale up and down anytime @ Location
@ Short/no contracts @ Slices
@ Poor disk IO
@ Total control @ More servers, more problems
@ Cheap ! @ Support
@ Overselling
@ Cloud A != Cloud B

What to do
@ Benchmark @ Try before you buy

@ Test, test and test some more


Storage : The problem
Storage = /sites/*/files

@ Multi web head environment
@ Web heads need more space than
their slice allows
@* LOTS of files in a single dir (10k+)


Storage : The solutions

https://www.getpantheon.com/news/inside-pantheon-
valhalla-filesystem

@ Server with
big disk(s) / SAN / EBS + NFS
●
Tried, tested, works
●
Not very exciting
●
Single point of failure
●
Depending on your cloud could need a 64GB
ram server !!


Storage : The solutions

@ API storage + Fuse (Cloudfuse*, s3fs)
●
Theoretically unlimited storage
●
CDN with little or no extra effort
●
A bit bleeding edge / untested

@ Gluster FS / Similar
●
Impressive solution
●
Makes trade-offs drupal doesn't need
●
Complicated


Delivery : Do CDNs matter?
Dev server in Paris

YES

http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/WebTools/technical-tools-browser-test.aspx


Delivery : Types of CDN
http://wimleers.com/article/key-properties-of-a-cdn

@ Push (CloudFiles, S3 etc)
●
No redundant traffic
●
Complex set up

@ Pull (lots)
●
Very easy to set up
●
Redundant traffic

@ DNS (Cloudflare/incapsula)
●
Takes over your DNS
●
Does more than “just” CDN
●
We have not tested


Conclusions

@ The Cloud isn't a magic bullet
@ The best benchmark is your own app,
with replayed traffic.
@ Cloud providers differ a LOT
@ Storage can be complicated
@ CDNs can give you an easy big win


What did we do?
@ Power : Cloud, Yes … but still in testing
●
Using Dediserve.com
https://billing.dediserve.com/?affid=148
●
Still re-tuning web heads PHP-FPM vs mod_php.
●
Hopefully live next week!

@ Storage : NFS
●
Simple, tried and tested.
●
Using a NFS mount used by all web heads.

@ CDN : Yes! CDN pull.
●
Easy win ! Very easy to set up.
●
Dediserve's CDN.
●
Also using CDN module to spread assets over several
domains (improves front end performance)

* Lots of files / * Cloud fuse
@ Lots of files ...
Close to 1M files in a single directory
●
Wrote custom drupal 6 module to fix
●
As part of the file save hooks, it moved the file to a folder
structure based on the filename.
●
/sites/default/files/<new_folder>/images/123.jpg
●
On drupal.org, but alpha

@ Cloudfuse + CDN + Lots of files
●
Working proof of concept
●
Uses Rackspace cloud files for both storage and CDN
●
Requires pre-generation of imagecache
●
Not published … yet.


Thank you
Questions?

Alex McFadyen, CTO

drupal.org : a_c_m || drupal.org/user/195063
email : alex@demotix.com
twitter : @a_c_m

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