Computing is full of buzzwords, “cloud computing” being the latest one. But unlike most trends that fizzle out after the initial surge, cloud computing is here to stay. This article goes over Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service and guides you to implementing a WordPress plugin that backs up your WordPress database to Amazon’s S3 cloud. Note that this is not a tutorial on creating a WordPress plugin from scratch, so some familiarity with plugin development is assumed.

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I recently had to move our production database at Listia.com from a custom MySQL installation over to Amazon RDS.  The big benefits of RDS for us were automated backups, automatic failover to another availability zone, quick instance size scaling with no downtime (edit: up to 3 minutes of downtime, can be more if there are issues) , and super easy slave deployment.  We had been managing all of it ourselves over the past year with just 2-3 people (btw, we are well-funded and hiring now!) and it was taking up a lot of our time to maintain everything while scaling from 0 to over 20 million pageviews a month.

One of my first tasks as a new developer here at Ginzametrics has been to help migrate our production servers to AWS, not because our current setup is failing us in any kind of egregious way, but because we’re looking to better automate provisioning and scaling of the platform itself up to millions of keywords. It also helps that Amazon has very recently launched a new data center in Tokyo, right in the backyard of many Ginza customers.

If you’ve never worked with AWS before, your first foray will most likely be somewhat confusing. Part of it is that Amazon’s documentation, while thorough, is needlessly verbose and labyrinthine, to the point where it might take three or four hours of ceaseless jumping, scanning, and focused reading before you have even the slightest grip on how to bring up an EC2 instance. And even if you are familiar with the AWS-EC2 ecosystem, you’re probably always looking for better tools to make life easier.

Enter Rubber, a Capistrano/Rails plugin that promises to automate the provisioning of both vertically and horizontally scalable multi-instance EC2 deployment configurations.

Since a few days ago this weblog serves 100% of its content directly out of the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) without the need for a web server to be involved.  Because my blog is almost completely static content I wanted to run in this very simple configuration since the launch of Amazon S3. It would allow the blog to be powered by the incredible scale and reliability of Amazon S3 with a minimum of effort from my side. I know of several other customers who had asked for this greatly simplifying feature as well. I had held out implementing an alternative to my simple blog server that had been running at a traditional hosting site for many years until this preferred simple solution became available: today marks that day and I couldn't be happier about it.

I've been calling this doc, while I was writing it, "EC2 for Poets."

The goal is to make cloud computing less mysterious by helping people through the process of setting up a server on Amazon EC2. The title derives from a class that was offered at the University of Wisconsin, when I was a grad student there, called Computer Science for Poets.

I loved the idea then, and still do. Engineers sometimes mystify what they do, as a form of job security. I prefer to make light of it, so more people will be tempted to give it a try. It was easy for me, why shouldn't it be easy for everyone?