Shifting Drupal to Amazon's cloud

Relocating to the Cloud

When it comes to migrating a website to AWS [1], there is usually a reason: in our case, an overly sluggish Drupal installation, hosted in a data center. Before making such a move, however, you need to ensure that the site scales automatically, is highly available, and is easy to manage. In AWS, you can point and click to compile such an environment with very little effort – as long as you are not afraid of vendor lock-in.

Figure 1 shows the typical status quo: A website runs on a server at a data center, uses a database, and is usually accessible via an Internet gateway with a static IP address. Either the provider operates the site themselves, or they use a hosted service. As a result, this traditional setup exposes a website to multiple single points of failure.

Figure 1: Traditional website setups typically contain multiple single points of failure.

Regardless of who operates the site, if one of the components has a problem, the website is no longer accessible. In addition, changes to such an environment are time-consuming; keeping the site in sync with the development stack causes extra work. Also, this scenario does not scale automatically: If the server load drops or rises, you have to manually make changes to the hardware.

Finally,

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