Cloud Hosting Stategies 
for Developers and Agencies
John Studdard
Managing Partner

john@bigcouchmedia.com
   @johnstuddard
@bigcouchmedia
Interactive Agency
South Florida Based
Stratetic Consulting
Drupal Development
Online Marketing Mgmt
Ads Sales Ops/Mgmt
Traditional
Choices
Buy Servers and Colocate
Shared/Grid Hosting
Dedicated Servers
Virtual Private Servers
The Cloud
CapEx
Long Term Agreements
Server OS/Management
Upgrades
Licensing
Poor Performance
No Root Access
No DRUSH
No Tweaking
Just Lame
Expensive
Locked into Hardware
Reprovision Challenges
Monthly Committment
IaaS
Cost Effective
Usage based pricing
In-place upgrades
Root Access
Quickly Scale Up or Out
Server Images
IaaS
PaaS
SaaS
Platform as a Service
A runtime-system and application framework that presents itself as an execution environment and computing platform available over the Internet with the sole purpose of acting as a host to application software

Examples: Google App Engine, Force.com, Amazon SimpleDB and Simple Queue Service, Microsoft Azure
Software as a Service
Specialized software functionality delivered over the Internet to users who intend to use the set of delivered functionality to augment or replace their application domain solutions

Examples: Google Apps, Salesforce.com CRM, QuickBooks Online
Infrastructure as a Service
Computing resources such as servers, storage, and other forms of low level network and hardware resources offered in a virtual, on demand fashion over the Internet. IaaS in a general sense, delivers value similar to a utility like dial tone from the phone company and power from the electric company.

Examples – RackSpace Cloud, Amazon EC2 and S3, GoGrid, Slicehost
Ask 10 people, get 10 different answers
The Good
Fanatical Support
Load Balanced
Clustered Web and MySQL
"Unlimited" Scalability
"Ok" for Small Sites
Easy FTP, DNS, EMAIL and SSL
Integrated Billing
PhpMyAdmin provided
Can build custom hosting plans
Flat Rate $149 will cover a LOT of small sites
Auto site snapshots
CloudSites
The Not So Good...
LOTS of outages over last year
"No nodes available to service your request"
Database Access SLLOOWW
Can be impacted by neighbors
No Root Access (DRUSH)
No MySQL tuning
Only tuning in PHP.ini
Usage for Drupal Development sites
Can mitigate some perfromance issues with Boost Module
Damn sales chat window everytime you go to their site
CloudServers
CloudFiles
The Good
Fanatical Support
Cheap on-demand pricing 
256mb Linux box starts at $10.95/month
Select your OS
In-place server upgrades/downgrades
Control Panel and API access
On-demand, Daily and Weekly server snapshots
Linux and Windows
Faster than EC2 Servers
The Not So Good...
Can't build server from snapshots
Have to build each server from scratch
No persistant storage
Can't mount CloudFiles Storage
No load balancers
The Good
Fanatical Support
Cheap unlimited Storage (.15/gb)
Control Panel
Desktop Software Clients
Open API Access
Public/Private access rules
CDN via LimeLight
Great for media storage
The Not So Good...
Can't access it from CloudServers
EC2
The Good
Amazon Machine Images
Elastic Block Storage (EBS) now bootable
Mountable persistent storage
Elastic Load Balancers
Point and Click install of Patheon Mercury
Tons of Drupal/OS Images
EBS snapshots to S3
Quick server deployment
The Not So Good...
Only Paid Support
Slower than CloudServers
The Good
Sames a CloudFiles
Lots of utilities and scripts available
Drupal Module
Backup & Migrate Module integration
US and Europe Regions
S3
The Not So Good...
Only Paid Support
The Options
Amazon EC2 vs. RackSpace Cloud
We use both....
http://chadkeck.com/2009/12/cloud-vps-apache-performance-comparison/
Our Stategy
Pretty Simple...
CloudSites
Small sites (WordPress or Drupal)
Redirect/doorway Sites
Static Sites
Cost Sensitive
CloudServers
Dedicated Single Server Client Sites
Need Root Access
Need to Tune
Aegir
Development Sites
OpenAtrium
Feature Server
Cost and Performance Sensitive
EC2
Dedicated Multi-Server Client Sites
Load Balancing
Patheon Mercury
Scale up and down often
Performance Sensitive
This is the area we will be playing in for Cloud Hosting
VPS are the ticket for Cloud Hosting
Drupal
Management
The Good
Drupal Platform/Site Management
Front End - Drupal
Backend - DRUSH
Built on Hostmaster and Provision Modules
Includes Create, clone, backup, restore, migrate
DRUSH make support
Developed by development seed
Supports multiple distros and intall profiles
Challenges...
Bitch to setup (getting better)
Requires command-line, can't run in shared environment
Permissions are tough
Clone issues for files table and imagecache (use sitefiles_migrate)
Troubleshooting is difficult (cryptic DRUSH errors)
Requires LAMP, no Windows




http://groups.drupal.org/aegir-hosting-system