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Imthiaz’s Blog powered by Amazon CloudFront

I have been experimenting with Amazon Web Services for sometime. I was successful in offloading media traffic with the help of Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront plugin for WordPress. But it was never enough. Please don’t think my blog traffic is very high, but this is the only website I have with which I could experiment and explore the new frontiers of cloud.

Two weeks ago I decided that I should start serious blogging again and as a part of commitment I would move the blog to a better hosting environment. Moving to Media Temple about a year ago was one of serious mistake. In terms for the scaling etc, media temple is good. In terms of server management I missed WHM and Cpanel very much. Plus media temple has many uninformed outages for my blog which was seriously disturbing for me.

Once again I was out searching for cloud based hosting. I experimented with Amazon EC2 micro instance which turned out awesomely bad experience. The instance never had dedicated CPU so my blog could get stuck for few seconds at times and it was bad. I started checking out some my previous hosting companies. Westhost had moved to cloud based hosting solution and their reseller hosting package was under my budget and was loaded with WHM. Moved all my sites to the new hosting environment.

After moving the site I decided to serve my blog with Amazon CloudFront. CloudFront has a feature to serve files from custom origin. With this feature I can create a distribution and point the source of the distribution to my web server. For more information on this please refer Amazon documentation for CloudFront.

Comments – When you use CloudFront the communication is one way, so having WordPress comments is out of the question. I have to look for hosted comments system. LiveFyre came to rescue, and it has 100% compatibility with WordPress.

Mobile Theme – CloudFront supports single cache for a page, So having a separate theme for mobile was not applicable. My friend Shuja Shabandri suggested to use responsive theme. After searching for a while I came with simple and responsive design Bugis by Elmastudio.

Content Expiry – CloudFront by default does caching for 24 hours. I had to reduce the caching to 30 minutes for HTML and others to 24 hours. For this I used Expires Headers from Apache.

Will be updating more on this latter ;-)

Update: Did a load test using Load Impact Free Load Test and the load time were impressive…

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AWS – Adding extra EBS volume to your EC2 instance

When you boot an Amazon Linux EC2 instance it boots with a 8GB EBS volume. If you need more space you need to add additional drives. For this you need to use EBS volumes.

Before you start the process please have look at the current partition blocks loaded in your server. You can do so using the contents of partition file.

Now you goto EBS volume manager in AWS console and create a new volume, make sure the zone is the same in which your EC2 instance is running.

Once the volume is created you need to attach this to an instance. You can right click on the created volume and say attach. Select the instance then device will populate automatically, you can either leave it or change if you need specific device name.

Now check the partition file again. You can see a new device being added.

The volume attached is not ready for use. It is like a new hard disk. You need to partition and format the same. In our case I am going to use the full disk as one partition. So I am going to skip the fdisk setup and jumping right into formatting the volume.

The format process can take few seconds just be patient. The drive is ready to use, and to do the same we need mount it.

If you wish this device to mount automatically when you reboot the server make sure you add this to your fstab file.

When I started which Amazon Cloud, I found these things in a hard way, hope this can help someone :-)

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Amazon IAM Policy – Readonly Access to single s3 bucket

IAM policy can be used to give readonly access to a single S3 bucket in Amazon cloud for a particular user.

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Publicis Groupe Acquires Flip Media, Leading Middle Eastern Digital Agency

Publicis Groupe announced today its acquisition of Flip Media, a leading digital agency in the Middle East. The agency will be folded into Leo Burnett Worldwide and will retain its name.

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Dubai (UAE), Flip Media has more than 100 employees across the Middle East and India, and has worked with some of the region’s most well-known brands. The agency provides end-to-end digital solutions, including strategy, design and production, content and delivery, and technology across all platforms. In the years since its inception, Flip has been recognized across the region for its award-winning creative and pioneering technology. Its founders, Martin Diessner and Dinesh Lalvani, will continue to be involved as non-executive directors with Flip and Yousef Tuqan will remain CEO reporting into Leo Burnett’s Middle East North Africa CEO, Raja Trad.

“Flip Media is a strategic and cultural fit for our company, and we believe its service offering of digital strategy, design, production and content delivery will be a perfect complement to the incredibly strong digital presence we have built across the region,” said Tom Bernardin, CEO of Leo Burnett Worldwide.

“This acquisition is the logical next step for Flip,” said Dinesh Lalvani and Martin Diessner, co-founders, Flip Holdings Ltd. “Integrating with a global network gives us the opportunity to provide a strong foundation for through-the-line communications strategy with digital at its core. We’ve been lucky to have the talent and dedication of a strong management team, which has been integral to the success we’ve had. Being part of Leo Burnett and the larger Publicis Groupe family will bring with it access to more clients, people and resources, all of which are key to take a company like ours to the next level.”

“Leo Burnett’s commitment to all its partners is to deliver a complete communication solution across all channels,” said Raja Trad, CEO of Leo Burnett MENA. “Today’s acquisition of Flip Media not only strengthens our offering but, more importantly, represents an important investment in strengthening our digital offering to the benefit of our clients’ businesses. Our mission is to ingrain digital thinking into every aspect of Leo Burnett’s work and culture. With Flip Media’s outstanding track record in their space, we are confident that all of our clients will appreciate our strategic plan to be an unquestionable leader in digital communication.”