Tag Archives: aws

Totally cached out

We do a good deal of cacheing on our web properties here at Cooper-Hewitt.

Our web host, PHPFog adds a layer of cacheing for free known as Varnish cache. Varnish Cache sits in front of our web servers and performs what is known as reverse proxy cacheing. This type of cacheing is incredibly important as it adds the ability to quickly serve cached files to users on the Internet vs. continually recreating dynamic web-pages by making calls into the database.

For static assets such as images, javascripts, and css files, we turn to Amazon’s CloudFront CDN. This type of technology ( which I’ve mentioned in a number of other posts here ) places these static assets on a distributed network of “edge” locations around the world, allowing quicker access to these assets geographically speaking, and as well, it removes a good deal of burden from our application servers.

However, to go a bit further, we thought of utilizing memcache. Memcache is an in-memory database key-value type cacheing application. It helps to speed up calls to the database by storing as much of that information in memory as possible. This has been proven to be extremely effective across many gigantic, database intensive websites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest ( to name just a few ). Check this interesting post on scaling memcached at Facebook.

To get started with memcache I turned to Amazon’s Elasticache offering. Elasticache is essentially a managed memcache server. It allows you to spin up a memcache cluster in a minute or two, and is super easy to use. In fact, you could easily provision a terabyte of memcache in the same amount of time. There is no installation, configuration or maintenance to worry about. Once your memcache cluster is up and running you can easily add or remove nodes, scaling as your needs change on a nearly real-time basis.

Check this video for a more in-depth explanation.

Elasticache also works very nicely with our servers at PHPFog as they are all built on Amazon EC2, and are in fact in the same data center. To get the whole thing working with our www.cooperhewitt.org blog, I had to do the following.

  1. Create a security group. In order for PHPFog to talk to your own Elasticache cluster, you have to create a security group that contains PHPFog’s AWS ID. There is documentation on the PHPFog website on how to do this for use with an Amazon RDS server, and the same steps apply for Elasticache.
  2. Provision an Elasticache cluster. I chose to start with a single node, m1.large instance which gives me about 7.5 Gig of RAM to work with at $0.36 an hour per node. I can always add more nodes in the future if I want, and I can even roll down to a smaller instance size by simply creating another cluster.
  3. Let things simmer for a minute. It takes a minute or two for your cluster to initialize.
  4. On WordPress install the W3TC plugin. This plugin allows you to connect up your Elasticache server, and as well offers tons of configurable options for use with things like a CloudFront CDN and more. Its a must have! If you are on Drupal or some other CMS. there are similar modules that achieve the same result.
  5. In W3TC enable whatever types of cacheing you wish to do and set the cache type to memcache. In my case, I chose page cache, minify cache, database cache, and object cache, all of which work with memcache. Additionally I set up our CloudFront CDN from within this same plugin.
  6. In each cache types config page, set your memcache endpoint to the one given by your AWS control panel. If you have multiple nodes, you will have to copy and paste them all into each of these spaces. There is a test button you can hit to make sure your installation is communicating with your memcache server.

That last bit is interesting. You can have multiple clusters with multiple nodes serving as cache servers for a number of different purposes. You can also use the same cache cluster for multiple sites, so long as they are all reachable via your security group settings.

Once everything is configured and working you can log out and let the cacheing being. It helps to click through the site to allow the cache to build up, but this will happen automatically if your site gets a decent amount of traffic. In the AWS control panel you can check on your cache cluster in the CloudWatch tab where you can keep track of how much memory and cpu is being utilized at any given time. You can also set up alerts so that if you run out of cache, you get notified so you can easily add some nodes.

We hope to employ this same cacheing cluster on our main cooperhewitt.org website, as well as a number of our other web properties in the near future.

Building the wall

Last month we released our collection data on Github.com. It was a pretty monumental occasion for the museum and we all worked very hard to make it happen. In an attempt to build a small example of what one might do with all of this data, we decided to build a new visualization of our collection in the form of the “Collection Wall Alpha.”

The collection wall, Alpha

The collection wall, Alpha

The idea behind the collection wall was simple enough–create a visual display of the objects in our collection that is fun and interactive. I thought about how we might accomplish this, what it would look like, and how much work it would be to get it done in a short amount of time. I thought about using our own .csv data, I tinkered, and played, and extracted, and extracted, and played some more. I realized quickly that the very data we were about to release required some thought to make it useful in practice. I probably over-thought.

Isotope

Isotope

After a short time, we found this lovely JQuery plugin called Isotope. Designed by David DeSandro, Isotope offers “an exquisite Jquery plugin of magical layouts.” And it does! I quickly realized we should just use this plugin to display a never-ending waterfall of collection objects, each with a thumbnail, and linked back to the records in our online collection database. Sounds easy enough, right?

Getting Isotope to work was pretty straight-forward. You simply create each item you want on the page, and add class identifiers to control how things are sorted and displayed. It has many options, and I picked the ones I thought would make the wall work.

Next I needed a way to reference the data, and I needed to produce the right subset of the data–the objects that actually have images! For this I decided to turn to Amazon’s SimpleDB. SimpleDB is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s a super-simple to implement, scalable, non-relational database which requires no setup, configuration, or maintenance. I figured it would be the ideal place to store the data for this little project.

Once I had the data I was after, I used a tool called RazorSQL to upload the records to our SimpleDB domain. I then downloaded the AWS PHP SDK and used a few basic commands to query the data and populate the collection wall with images and data. Initially things were looking good, but I ran into a few problems. First, the data I was querying was over 16K rows tall. Thats allot of data to store in memory. Fortunately, SimpleDB is already designed with this issue in mind. By default, a call to SimpleDB only returns the first 100 rows ( you can override this up to 2500 rows ). The last element in the returned data is a special token key which you can then use to call the next 100 rows.

Using this in a loop one could easily see how to grab all 16K rows, but that sort of defeats the purpose as it still fills up the memory with the full 16K records. My next thought was to use paging, and essentially grab 100 rows at a time, per page. Isotope offers a pretty nifty “Infinite Scroll” configuration. I thought this would be ideal, allowing viewers to scroll through all 16K images. Once I got the infinite scroll feature to work, I realized that it is an issue once you page down 30 or 40 pages. So, I’m going to have to figure out a way to dump out the buffer, or something along those lines in a future release.

After about a month online, I noticed that SimpleDB charges were starting to add up. I haven’t really been able to figure out why. According to the docs, AWS only charges for “compute hours” which in my thinking should be much less than what I am seeing here. I’ll have to do some more digging on this one so we don’t break the bank!

SimpleDB charges

SimpleDB charges

Another issue I noticed was that we were going to be calling lots of thumbnail images directly from our collection servers. This didn’t seem like such a great idea, so I decided to upload them all to an Amazon S3 bucket. To make sure I got the correct images, I created simple php script that went through the 16K referenced images and automatically downloaded the correct resolution. It also auto-renamed each file to correspond with the record ID. Lastly, I set up an Amazon CloudFront CDN for the bucket, in hopes that this would speed up access to the images for users far and wide.

Overall I think this demonstrates just one possible outcome of our releasing of the collection meta-data. I have plans to add more features such as sorting and filtering in the near future, but it’s a start!

Check out the code after the jump ( a little rough, I know ).

Continue reading

Media servers and some open sourceness

We use Amazon S3 for a good portion of our media hosting. It’s a simple and cost effective solution for serving up assets big and small. When we moved initially to Drupal 6.x ( about a year ago ) I wanted to be sure that we would use S3 for as many of our assets as possible. This tactic was partly inspired by wanting to keep the Drupal codebase nice and clean, and also to allow us to scale horizontally if needed ( multiple app servers behind a load balancer ).

Horizontal Scaling

Horizontal Scaling

So in an attempt to streamline workflows, we modified this amazon_s3 Drupal module a little. The idea was to allow authors to easily use the Drupal node editor to upload their images and PDFs directly to our S3 bucket. It would also rewrite the URLs to pull the content from our CloudFront CDN. It also sorts your images into folders based on the date ( a-la-Wordpress).

amazon_s3

Our fork of amazon_s3 rewrite the URL for our CDN, and sorts into folders by date.

I’ve opened sourced that code now which is simply a fork of the amazon_s3 module. It works pretty well on Drupal 6.x. It has an issue where it uploads assets with some incorrect meta-data. It’s really only a problem for uploaded PDFs where the files will download but won’t open in your browser. This has to do with the S3 metadata tag of application/octet-stream vs. application/pdf. All in all I think its a pretty useful module.

As we move towards migrating to Drupal 7, I have been doing some more research about serving assets via S3 and CloudFront. Additionally, it seems that the Drupal community have developed some new modules which should help streamline a few things

Custom Origin

Create a CloudFront distribution for you whole site using a custom origin

As of a couple years ago Amazon’s CloudFront CDN allows you to use a custom origin. This is really great as you can simply tell it to pull from your own domain rather than an S3 bucket.

So for example, I set this blog up with a CloudFront distribution that pulls direct from https://www.cooperhewitt.org. The resultant distribution is at https://d2y3kexd1yg34t.cloudfront.net. If you go to that URL you should see a mirror of this site. Then all we have to do is install a plugin for WordPress to replace static asset URLs with the CloudFront URL. You might notice this in action if you inspect the URL of any images on the site. You can of course add a CNAME to make the CloudFront URL prettier, but it isn’t required.

On the Drupal end of things, there is a simple module called CDN that does the same thing as we are doing here via the WordPress W3TC plugin. It simply replaces static asset files with your CloudFront domain. Additionally, I see there is now a new Drupal module called amazons3 ( note the lack of the underscore ). This module is designed to allow Drupal to replace it’s default file system with your S3 bucket. So, when a user uploads files through the Drupal admin interface ( which normally sends files to sites/default/files on your local server ) files automatically wind up in your S3 bucket.

I haven’t gotten this to work as of yet, but I think it’s a promising approach. Using this setup, you could maintain a clean and scalable Drupal codebase, keeping all of your user uploaded assets on an S3 bucket without much change to the standard workflow within the Drupal backend. NICE!

 

Moving to the Fog

When people have asked me where we host our website, I have usually replied with “it’s complicated.”

Last week we made some serious changes to our web infrastructure. Up until now we have been running most of our web properties on servers we have managed ourselves at Rackspace. These have included dedicated physical servers as well as a few cloud based instances. We also have a couple of instances running on Amazon EC2, as well as a few properties running at the Smithsonian Mothership in Washington DC.

For a long time, I had been looking for a more seamless and easier to manage solution. This was partially achieved when I moved the main site from our old dedicated server to a cloud-based set of instances behind a Rackspace load balancer. It seemed to perform pretty well, but still I was mostly responsible for it on my own.

PHPFog

PHPFog can be used to easily scale your web-app by adding multiple app servers

Eventually I discovered a service built on top of Amazon EC2 known as PHPFog. This Platform as a Service (PaaS) is designed to allow people like myself to easily develop and deploy PHP based web apps in the Cloud. Essentially, what PHPFog does is set up an EC2 instance, configured and optimized by their own design. This is placed behind their own set of load balancers, Varnish Cache servers and other goodies, and connected up with an Amazon RDS MySQL server. They also give you a hosted Git repository, and in fact, Git becomes your only connection to the file system. At first this seemed very un-orthrodox. No SSH, no FTP, nothing… just Git and PHPMyAdmin to deal with the database. However, I spent a good deal of time experimenting with PHPFog and after a while I found the workflow to be really simple and easy to manage. Deployment is as easy as doing a Git Push, and the whole thing worked in a similar fashion to Heroku.com, the popular Ruby on Rails PaaS.

What’s more is that PHPFog, being built on EC2 was fairly extensible. If I wanted to, I could easily add an ElastiCache server, or my own dedicated RDS server. Basically, through setting up security groups which allow communication to PHPFog’s instances, I am able to connect to just about anything that Amazon AWS has to offer.

I continued to experiment with PHPFog and found some additional highlights. Each paid account comes with a free NewRelic monitoring account. NewRelic is really great as it offers a much more comprehensive monitoring system than many of the typical server alerting and monitoring apps available today. You can really get a nice picture of where the different bottlenecks are happening on your app, and what the real “end user” experience is like. In short, NewRelic was the icing on the cake.

NewRelic

Our NewRelic Dashboard

So, last week, we made the switch and are now running our main cooperhewitt.org site on “The Fog.” We have also been running this blog on the same instance. In fact, if you are really interested, you can check out our NewRelic stats for the last three hours in the “Performance menu tab!” It took a little tweaking to get our NewRelic alerts properly configured, but they seem to be working pretty seamlessly now.

Here’s a nice video explaining how AppFog/PHPFog works.

As you can see, we’ve got a nice little stack running here and all easily managed with minimal staff resource.

And here’s a somewhat different Fog altogether.

(Yes we are a little John Carpenter obsessed here)