Chapter 11. Drupal and Cloud Deployments
You’ve probably heard one of two things about “the Cloud”:
- Cloud deployments are the future and the present; the be all and end all of flexible, dynamic, enterprise-grade, and agile infrastructure design.
- Cloud deployments are entirely a marketing innovation and are championed by people who probably should be in the PR department, but somehow wandered into the wrong meetings too many times and are now on the technical staff.
You can easily hear both of these arguments at any major conference (usually in the same conversation and at high volume). You might say there is some disagreement in the community on the merits of the cloud. We will try to clear up some of the confusion in this chapter.
What Is the Cloud?
That this question must be asked is one reason some people find the concept of “the cloud” annoying. The term is used so often that it now means basically nothing (a phenomenon now known as “cloud washing”). For our purposes, we will be defining the cloud as a virtualized hosting solution, where VMs can be created and destroyed on demand via an API with no human interaction. This is a very common definition and fits clouds such as Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. Just to be absolutely clear, by “API” we mean a client-visible API that allows you to script automatic growth and shrinking of an array of servers.
Why Use the Cloud?
The major advantage of a cloud deployment is flexibility. If you need 10 web nodes today, 30 tomorrow, and 5 the ...