drupal in the cloud with windows azure

Drupal in the Cloud

Jim SalemJosh KoenigPierre Couzy

#drupalinthecloudBrought to you by Adam Hansen

Azure & Drupal

(work in progress)

Pierre Couzy – Microsoftpierre.couzy@microsoft.com

Azure - where

Data Center

Hosted Service

LB

CDN

Web Site(ASPX, ASMX, WCF)Web Site

(ASPX, ASMX, WCF)Web RoleWorker ServiceWorker Role

LB

StorageTables Blobs

Queue

Browser

Azure - what

Quick facts

• Who is working on this ?– Microsoft & Commerce Guys

• Where can I find it ?– On d.o

• When can I use it ?– Should be complete before summer

• How can I test on Azure ?– Try « azure one month pass » in your search engine

Provisioning the web farm

• Azure basic deployment unit is a Role– Application package (drupal in our case)– Size of machines– Number of machines– Firewall configuration

• A drupal package is– PHP runtime & configuration– Drupal code– Deployment-specific settings

Relational data go to Sql Azure

• Highly available, pay per volume– 10$/month/Gb

• Current implementation uses Sql Azure for– Sessions,– Queues,– Caches,– Locks,– Fields

• Some of these will change

If you *really* want MySql on Azure

VIP

MySQL

VIP

Load Balancer

MySQL MySQLMySQL

MS S

VIP

Load Balancer

MySQL MySQL

Load Balancer

Doable, but you’ll manage a lot of moving parts. See http://bit.ly/93Jgib

Other content goes to Blob storage

• Highly scalable• Stream wrapper API available for PHP– Special credits to DamZ for ironing this

• Some concepts differ from filesystem– 2-level structure (container+blob)– Extended Metadata available– Security is done differently

Using blob storage

Performance tuning

• You can use the usual suspects– APC/Wincache for local caching– Redis/Memcache for distributed caching

• There’s also a CDN in Azure– Until yesterday, hooked up to blob storage– Now usable on Azure Roles (web farms)• Will honour caching headers from dynamic content• Understands https • Understands query string

Where are we now ?

• Sql Azure driver : done• Blob storage module : in progress– Needs to plug in the CDN– Leverage the authorization mechanism

• Deployment & updates : just beginning– Azure has instant-switch between staging & prod– Plus hot database backups– We’re looking at other projects to help

What did you think?Locate this session on the DCC website:http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions

Click the “Take the Survey” link.

Thanks!