Amazon Web Services

[tpearl5]

Has anyone setup vbulletin using Amazon web services. If so, how it is working? How did you do it?

[royo]

The prices for it are pretty high, even for a pay-as-you go service. You would need to use EC2, S3 and probably SimpleDB, which would be somewhat slow if your forum has a larger activity. How come you are looking to set something like this up on Amazon Web Services? Do your needs really extend very high in terms of scalability?

[tpearl5]

I thought the prices were pretty good.

I'm adding some sections to the site soon that will require some more resources.

[royo]

Compared to having it all on a more powerful server, using AWS will be slower, even though you might save a little bit here and there, some of the resources such as disk I/O will be shared.

[Andy Huang]

Only thing I'd consider throwing over to S3 would be large attachments (IE: videos/music/zip archive/large pdf files etc.). Anything else are probably too important to rely off of third party...

[allwin]

I would love to move computing to the cloud for the following reasons - we are a growing company and very soon we would need more than 4/5 servers and as we continue to grow we'd need load balancers and the full monty. The challenge and expenses of maintaining such systems are huge including the cost of the techs.

Something like AWS helps keep the infrastructure scalable & manageable and much cheaper than what it would take if we went at it alone.

Even now we lease servers, I don't see why I wouldn't trust the database to run on amazon's servers. Heck, I may be able to snapshot and save more copies of my sites than ever before.

[royo]

I doubt you'll be able to see the same performance from Amazon. What kind of hardware setup do you have running right now, and what are your forums' statistics ?

[allwin]

Right now we use dual cpu quad core machines for the DB and similar for the front end. My trouble is we are growing very fast and will soon hit 5 - 7000 users online at any point and we would rather scale at will than manage a multiple server setup ..

[royo]

Took you a bit to answer, let us know how it went.... I doubt you can really scale with amazon aws when it comes to speed, but who knows...

[allwin]

Royo, we haven't done this yet. But we are looking to go ahead and do it. For now our dev team is working on applications that will scale on AWS. So everything we now write is keeping in mind growth, but we still haven't found a good/possible way to scale vB

[royo]

What is the main bottleneck when clustering up several servers?

[allwin]

As a company, we work on multiple applications. Have developers working on multiple products and we are trying to make sure they have enough access to processing power & bandwidth at will. It is easier to build applications from ground up to use AWS - however porting something like vB is not easy.

In terms of bottleneck - we do not want to spent a ton of time managing hardware and also we would really like the ability to scale at will. With AWS we can do say backups at will and a ton of other things much faster & with more redundancy

[abrecher]

Has anybody gotten Vbulletin to function on Amazon Web Services ? We'd really love to hear from you!

[allwin]

If you are moving everything to AWS, it can work well. You need to create a linux image with your forum data et al and then launch it as an instance. However, for singular instances, I feel you may be better off with regular servers. For multiple instances, AWS might be worth it in certain cases.

Is there a detailed how to on this - not that I know of.

[domregchief]

Not sure if its cost effective for one site, but I am very early in real production testing of one of my Vbulletin forums on Amazon.

After testing it for a week, i decided to take a plunge and see how it performs under heavy load. One of my boards with ~1MM page views is now moved to AWS/EC2/EBS and I will report back once I get a good idea of what the performance and cost comes out to be for March.

Vbulletin doesnt have any special requirements.. As long as its a Lamp Stack it should work.. I just created a custom lampstack by using amazon's base fedora ami and then copied the entire directory of vbulletin and the database from my old server to the new server.

A high level getting started Guide..

1. Get Elastic Fox [ Enough Tutorials on the web on setup etc. ]
2. Fire Up Amazon's Fedora 8 Core Ami in a small instance, attached a new elastic ip address
3. ssh to the instance and customize.. I added various things like webmin/virtualmin etc., recompiled apache with some changes, added eaccelerator etc., etc.,
4. Created an EBS volume of 10 GB, added it to /etc/fstab, mounted the volume as /dbvol and moved htdocs and mysql directory and soft liked them back to the root volume
5. unmounted the volume and created a new ami, registered with amazon. Now I have a fully ready image that I can fire up any time I need it.
6. Launched a new instance with the new AMI and terminated the old one.
7. Mounted volume and its ready to go
8. Setup Virtual host in apache2
9. Copy Vbulletin code and MySQL DB from old server
10. Change DNS mapping
11. Its working with no challenges.

I have neither tuned the instance nor done anything special beyond installing the basic necessities.

This is not for the faint hearted.. If you are used to Cpanel and WHM, dont even venture into this as you will have to manually deal with a number of things that you take for granted in a vps like setup.

[calgarypuck]

Looking forward to your experience domregchief..

Our problem is we have a dedicated server, which is overkill 99% of the time, but the other 1% of the time we can't handle the load.

Cloud computing seems like the kind of thing that would be ideal. Pay less for the low times, and then pay more for the few hours a month or few days in a year where the # of users goes up by a factor of 3 or 4.

[shabbirbhimani]

domregchief, Any update on whats the status of your move as I am planning to move my forum into Amazon as well

[weinstoc]

In terms of bottleneck - we do not want to spent a ton of time managing hardware and also we would really like the ability to scale at will. With AWS we can do say backups at will and a ton of other things much faster & with more redundancy

Have you had success with scaling up? It's been some time since you posted this and I'm hoping you have experiences to share. I've been considering a move to EC2 for the same reasons.

[tpearl5]

I recently moved all my images and larger js files to S3 with cloudfront. I wanted to alleviate some of the static load on my database server and it's working well so far!

I'm going to try and move all CSS to a file and store that in s3 as well.