Deployment

RightScale provides all kinds of things — from a pre-configured MySQL master-slave setup (with automatic EBS/s3 backups), to a full LAMP stack, Rails app servers, virtually all kinds of other pre-configured server templates to a nifty auto-scaling feature. We decided to leverage RightScale when we planned our move to AWS a couple months ago in order to not have to build everything ourselves. I’ve been writing this blog entry for the past five weeks and here are some observations, thoughts and tips....

This is not (really a part) two of my series, but an Intermezzo (1) between Part I and Part III — because I have no time to finish Part III. In Part I, I talked about my approach to deploying a website and I offered pear and subversion as solutions to the problem. To briefly elaborate on my subversion part, I want to share the following Capistrano recipe with you....

Moving our PHP application into the cloud, means for us that we are leaving FreeBSD for Linux. Not the best move (IMHO), but I shall elaborate on this in a future blog post. Once we decided on Ubuntu as the Linux of our choice, I started by moving our development server to an instance on Slicehost. Point taken, Slicehost is not the cloud (as in Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Flexiscale or GoGrid) yet, but Linux on Slicehost and Linux on Amazon EC2 will be alike (or so I hope :-)) and a getting a small slice versus getting a small EC2 instance is an economical decision in the end....

I’m a big fan of capistrano for my deployment and generally also prefer the command line (vs. nifty web interfaces). Recently, I realized that it would be better to give up some responsibility to others on a project and it seems the easiest in terms of capistrano is webistrano — by the Berlin-based Peritor. Gimme a port! Because FreeBSD is and always will be my favorite operating system, I created a small port for webistrano on FreeBSD....

Disclaimer: I’ve been doing mostly PHP and Zend Framework based projects in the past two years, but the information from this article is general and should be applicable to most setups — even to non PHP-based projects (to a certain extent). Inspired by Padraic’s posting spree the other week, here’s another attempt to provide you with some hands-on usefulness. I’m all open for all feedback, and sorry for the length!...