With all the excitement surrounding cloud computing, and specifically Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Beta service, I decided it was time to give it a try myself. Without much personal background in the new service, I found that there are an overwhelming number of pages talking about EC2, and even Drupal on EC2, but didn't locate a simple guide to quickly get me up and running. Having now spent a few hours today learning the basics, I'm jotting down these quick notes to help the next person interested in trying the same, and in the hopes of attracting useful tips from other AWS users.

Why use InnoDB?

InnoDB is commonly viewed as anything but performant, especially when compared to MyISAM. Many actually call it slow. This view is mostly supported by old facts and mis-information. In reality, you would be very hard-pressed to find a current, production-quality MySQL Database Engine with the CPU efficiency of InnoDB. It has its performance "quirks" and there are definitely workloads for which it is not optimal, but for standard OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) loads, it is tough to find a better, safer fit.

We are honored to have received praise from Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, who said in his blog (emphasis added):

"It is not always easy to scale Drupal -- not because Drupal sucks, but simply because scaling the LAMP stack (including Drupal) takes no small amount of skill. [...] Either you can do all of the above yourself, or you outsource it to a company that knows how to do this for you. Both are non-trivial and I can count the number of truly qualified companies on one hand. Tag1 Consulting is one of the few Drupal companies that excel at this, in case you're wondering."

I'm pleased to announce that Tag1 Consulting has partnered up with MySQL AB to offer an online presentation titled "Achieving Optimal MySQL Performance For Drupal". Aiming to provide a better understanding of how to properly monitor and tune your MySQL database, the online Webinar will take place on Thursday, January 31st, 2008, at 16:00 UTC (11:00 am EST). The presentation will last 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes for questions and answers.

There are a number of ways to improve the amount of time it takes visitors to load your Drupal powered web site.

The Drupal Performance Agency is a group of independent companies and consultants who are dedicated to improving Drupal performance.

Mission:

• To provide unparalleled, on-demand performance consulting for Drupal-based projects
• To improve the Drupal project to scale to support extremely high-demand environments
• To assist in systems architecture planning for organizations deploying high-demand Drupal systems
• Document and publish performance architectures and best practices
• Work on high performance projects because it's lots of fun

Tips on load testing your web site.

This document offers some tips on how to migrate your Drupal website from a database running on the same server as your web server, to a physically separate database server.

Tag1 Consulting, Inc. employs highly experienced Drupal developers. Our Drupal specialties include the rapid development of quality Drupal modules, Views and CCK configuration and integration, third-party API integration, e-commerce development, and advertising. We are well versed with the core Drupal development process, and have submitted patches and modules that have been merged into the Drupal core.