Modx on Amazon EC2

Is anyone running MODx on Amazon EC?

If so, any pointers on the best AMI and any installation issues?

Planning on taking it for a test drive so if anyone has already kicked the tyres it would help a lot to get some advice

Regards

Mark

That looks like an absolutely horrible way to run a website! Why not just get yourself an inexpensive VPS? Or get a dedicated IP address from your ISP and run your own server?

Though we never deployed directly to Amazon EC2, we have deployed 0.9.6 and early releases of MODx Revolution to EC2 via RightScale, and though it takes a little more organization and planning, it’s basically no different than deploying on a traditional server instance. You’ll probably want to use EBS for persistent storage requirements, like PHP session data and your web assets, but in general, it’s no more difficult than deploying in a load balanced situation.

Unfortunately, since I haven’t used Amazon’s EC2 management services directly, I can’t really offer details of how to do the deployment.

Susan, the reason to deploy MODx on EC2 is like the instance we had, as load increases, more front end servers deployed to deal with crazy levels of traffic. I think during busy times there were 100 or more servers running. When traffic demands died down, the servers went offline, and with EC2, you’re only billed by the hour.

Thanks for the comments, I just think this could have a role in the future and may be worth getting to know.

Wow - 100 servers, that’s impressive!
Must visit the donate page soon to chip in and help...

Mark

I guess it’s just some really big cluster farms, with a pay-as-you-go policy. So I suppose in a case like yours, it would make sense.

Where EC2 really shines is in utility computing. For instance, say you were transcoding video, or 3D rendering, or streaming media serving, or financial data analysis sporadically and in big spikes. Spinning up new instances takes 5-10 minutes once they’re configured then you’ve got lots of processing power at your fingertips. When you’re done with the task, decommission the instances and stop accruing hourly charges.

I think it's much easier to use Jelastic Cloud in this case. Here's the detailed instruction http://blog.jelastic.com/2013/06/25/deploy-modx-cms/