Movable Type on EC2
April 18, 2010 at 08:00 PM | categories: Uncategorized | View CommentsI'm a big fan of virtual servers and I've always run this web site from one. Until recently I had it on a VMware instance on my home PC, although my recent experience with Amazon EC2 and a couple of large traffic spikes prompted me to move it.
In the end the process turned out to be pretty easy:
- Back up to Amazon S3 using duplicity:
- MySQL dump:
mysqldump --all-databases
- /etc/apache2
- /var/www
- Start an EC2 small instance running AMI Ubuntu 9.04 (ami-ccf615a5)
- Restore from Amazon S3
apt-get -y install apache2 duplicity libapache2-mod-perl2 libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl mysql-server perlmagick python-boto
- Restore MySQL dump, /etc/apache2 and /var/www using duplicity
- Run MySQL script against the local instance
- Start Apache. Check whether the static HTML pages and Movable Type's admin interface work.
- Assign an Amazon elastic IP address to the EC2 instance. This gives me a static IP address that I can refer to from DNS.
- Remap the DNS alias (an A record and a CNAME record) via my ISP's web site
- Done!
I'm happy with the changes so far:
- Performance has been fine: although publishing the site now takes 30 seconds not 15, I'm getting much better response times and bandwidth
- I'm paying to run an EC2 instance full time whereas before I was just paying for home power bills
- I'm not going to get shot by my ISP next time one of my posts appears on Reddit
The fact that I was taking daily backups made the move risk-free. It took a couple of attempts to get a working site on the EC2 server, but I was able to start a fresh instance and restore from backup each time. I also know that, if the site does fall over in future, restoring from backup will take a few minutes and I'll lose one day of data at most.