Well hello there! It’s been a while, but I finally found some time to work with the sites and the latest of Amazon Web Services. Lately, AWS has introduced the tiny micro instances with a tempting price tag for small businesses with not too much of a need for high performance. For me, those do sound fantastic for testing purposes as I have been wanting to try running the two sites, this and vkaiser.com on a bit more robust architecture than the current one with just an EBS based AMI and the videos in S3.
I run the typical LAMP stack on one AMI, thus the idea was first to boot up one micro instance and have a look. Well, I chose to go with some old image I had created way long time ago. It also had a LAMP stack installed, but of course it was kind of outdated and the vkaiser.com did not look too good (well, does it now either…), so I figured I could rsync the html folder of the Drupal installation and I did eventually get the rsync with public key working. Then I realized that the db wasn’t really up to date either and the drupal modules would not of course work, so how about connecting to the database on the current “production” which would kind of resemble the hopefully future setup too as running a separate db server (and slave) would just be the way to go at least with Drupal.
Settings in Drupal for remote database connections are really simple. First edit the MySQL configuration (/etc/my.cnf) to have
Bind-address=database_ip
And if you have skip networking defined, comment that out.
Then add remote access permissions to the database for a db user
GRANT ALL ON *.* TO ‘dbuser’@'remote_ip’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;
And modify the settings.php on the remote application server to point to the database server:
$db_url = ‘mysql://dbuser:password@database_ip/database_name’;
Then you can test the connection to the database. At least I got that working, though I was first editing the wrong settings.php file which of course did not prove to be very useful in getting the db connection working.
The real deal was though to see how the t1.micro performs under stress. I browsed a while for some tools with how to do the test, but then I found loadimpact.com which simulates really well concurrent users from 0-50 for free! With some euros, you can get up to 5000 users and customized tests and what not. I like the service, though it went down just as I got my t1.micro tested. The average response time was around 1.5 seconds for the vkaiser.com frontpage and it did not show any real implications of getting slower, thus I should put more load on the micro if I coughed up some cash. I next went on and tested my good old small instance and got about the same results
This wasn’t too scientific, though the results are encouraging. I mean, 50 concurrent users is about 49 more than this site usually has and the micro worked well, so I am planning to make a switch soon… More about that later!
