I had 4GB RAM which was the default when I bought the mac. After upgrading to Mac OS Lion I really needed more memory, Especially when I am working with Xcode. Local cost was around AED 580 (160 USD) for 2X4GB. Next option was to check online and Amazon came to rescue. Cost for 2X4GB was USD 43 international shipping cost was USD 42. Got greedy and ordered 4X4GB. Posting few pictures I took while changing the RAM….
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.
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<ifmodule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault "access plus 1800 seconds" ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1800 seconds" ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 86400 seconds" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 86400 seconds" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 86400 seconds" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 86400 seconds" ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 86400 seconds" ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 86400 seconds" ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 86400 seconds" </ifmodule> |
Will be updating more on this latter 😉
Update: Did a load test using Load Impact Free Load Test and the load time were impressive…
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.
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bash-4.1# cat /proc/partitions major minor #blocks name 202 1 8388608 xvda1 |
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.
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bash-4.1# cat /proc/partitions major minor #blocks name 202 1 8388608 xvda1 202 128 26214400 xvdi |
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.
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bash-4.1# mkfs.ext3 /dev/xvdi mke2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010) Filesystem label= OS type: Linux Block size=4096 (log=2) Fragment size=4096 (log=2) Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks 1638400 inodes, 6553600 blocks 327680 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user First data block=0 Maximum filesystem blocks=4294967296 200 block groups 32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group 8192 inodes per group Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 4096000 Writing inode tables: done Creating journal (32768 blocks): done Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done This filesystem will be automatically checked every 21 mounts or 180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override. |
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.
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bash-4.1# mkdir /media/newdrive bash-4.1# mount /dev/xvdi /media/newdrive/ bash-4.1# cd /media/newdrive/ bash-4.1# ls lost+found bash-4.1# df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda1 8256952 1298868 6874200 16% / tmpfs 3826296 0 3826296 0% /dev/shm /dev/xvdi 25803068 176196 24316152 1% /media/newdrive |
If you wish this device to mount automatically when you reboot the server make sure you add this to your fstab file.
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/dev/xvdi /media/newdrive/ ext3 noatime,nodiratime 0 0 |
When I started which Amazon Cloud, I found these things in a hard way, hope this can help someone 🙂
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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{ "Statement": [ { "Action": [ "s3:GetBucketAcl", "s3:GetBucketLocation", "s3:GetBucketNotification", "s3:GetBucketPolicy", "s3:GetBucketRequestPayment", "s3:GetBucketVersioning", "s3:GetObject", "s3:GetObjectAcl", "s3:GetObjectVersion", "s3:GetObjectVersionAcl", "s3:ListBucket", "s3:ListBucketMultipartUploads", "s3:ListBucketVersions", "s3:ListMultipartUploadParts" ], "Effect": "Allow", "Resource": [ "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET_NAME", "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET_NAME/*" ] } ] } |
Past couple of days I have been focusing hard to optimize my blog. Related to this I have been working on the next version of s3 plugin.
This version supports the following
Other developers can use this plugin to upload the files to s3 for example
1. This will scan the given content for images belonging to same domain. And will schedule the images for s3 upload. If the upload is done it will replace them in the text.
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<?php if(class_exists('S3Plugin')){ $output = S3Plugin::scanForImages($output); } |
2. Advanced if you are control freak like me you would like to get more options.
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<?php if(is_singular()){ $attachmentDetails = &get_children( "numberposts=1&post_type=attachment&post_mime_type=image&post_parent=" . get_the_ID() ); if(!empty ($attachmentDetails)){ $attachmentDetails = array_shift($attachmentDetails); $postImage = array_shift(wp_get_attachment_image_src($attachmentDetails->ID,'thumbnail')); if(class_exists('S3Plugin')){ $cdnImageURL = S3Plugin::getCDNURL($postImage); if($cdnImageURL!==FALSE){ $postImage = $cdnImageURL; } } } } |
If you are interested in testing please download the wp-s3 1.1 Alpha or checkout from wp-s3 plugin repository trunk.
And another happy new is my blog got a descent page speed score with this plugin update 😉
Note: Please not this plugin is in alpha stages. Please test this on local test environment before testing it on production sites.