Cloud to the rescue? How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud

DCAMP

Cloud to the rescue
How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud

Drupalcamp Arad 2012 - Alexandru Badiu - Cloud to the rescue 1

Sunday, November 18, 12

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



DCAMP

1
The cloud



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



DCAMP

The promise
‣ New servers anytime
‣ Scale up and down anytime
‣ Unlimited storage
‣ Pay only for what you use
‣ Short / no contracts
‣ Total control



DCAMP

Demotix
‣A quick 2 minute introduction
‣ http://prezi.com/_ugoyxm4qprv/demotixcom-2-

minutes/
‣ Acquired by Corbis a couple of days ago



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



DCAMP

Demotix before the cloud
‣ 1 Web server
‣ Varnish
‣ Apache, mod_php
‣ 1 Database server
‣ MySQL
‣ 1 Util server
‣ Memcached
‣ Solr
‣ FTP Server
‣ Beanstalk



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



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



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



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



DCAMP

2
Challenges



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?



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.



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



DCAMP

#4 - Total control
You need to be a sysadmin or become one

Servers crash at 3AM
‣ Monitoring systems
‣ Emergency instructions
‣ Disaster recovery



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



DCAMP

3
Benchmarks



DCAMP

Where to start?

Benchmarks
‣ Learn to
benchmark Drupal
‣ Cloudharmony.com



DCAMP

DB benchmarks



DCAMP

Disk/IO benchmarks



DCAMP

Mem/IO benchmarks



DCAMP

CPU benchmarks



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



DCAMP

4
Storage



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



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



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



DCAMP

5
CDNs



DCAMP

The problem with CDNs



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)



DCAMP

6
What did we do?



DCAMP

What did we do?

We picked Dediserve
http://dediserve.com



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)



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



DCAMP

7
Other issues and findings



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



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



DCAMP

8
Conclusions



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



DCAMP

Thanks!
Questions?

Alexandru Badiu.
Twitter @voidberg
Web http://ctrlz.ro

Email andu@ctrlz.ro

D.O http://drupal.org/user/8662



Cloud to the rescue? How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

En vedette

En vedette (18)

Similaire à Cloud to the rescue? How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud

Similaire à Cloud to the rescue? How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud (20)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

Cloud to the rescue? How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud