The TeleInterActive Lifestyle

Elastic CMS Deployments with Amazon Web Services & Server Virtualization Technology by Reuven Cohen, Chief Technologist, hosted by Derek Anderson, Lead Developer, Enomaly Inc

"Elastic CMS deployment is a model that allows for a operating system to be packaged as a virtual appliance in conjunction to the core content management system components. As system requirements change the CMS can intelligently adapt itself with little or no human involvement.

"Applying the designs of Virtualization, Business Process Execution Language, SOA, Amazon Web services (EC2 & S3) with content management presents an opportunity for a virtual content layer, whereby enterprise content management is defined not as a monolithic repository but rather as a logical library of interchangeable self-describing & self replicating components based on established performance policies.

"This approach allows for content management systems that can be configured to scale across single servers, multiple physical servers, multiple virtualized servers, grids or a combination of all of the above, natively, without modification. The approach allows for even the simplest applications (CMS,CRM,Blog,Forum,etc) to be scaled to millions of users with little or no additional development work. As system requirements grow, so does your content management system, on the fly.

"This presentation will demonstration the elastic capabilities of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon S3, Xen virtualization with open source CMS systems TYPO3, Alfresco and Drupal. Elastic server management will be provided by the Enomalism (LGPL) open source virtual server dashboard."

-- Abstract for Elastic CMS Deployments with Amazon Web Services & Server Virtualization Technology by Reuven Cohen, Chief Technologist, Enomaly Inc

The presentation was done by Derek, who likes to code when the snow gets deep up in Canada, eh.

Elastic computing provides web services via SOAP or other API to allow one to remotely provision and manage one's virtual appliance. [Definition: a virtual appliance is a pre-packaged guest operating system with optimized software to perform a specific function or support a specific process.] Essentially, infrastructure as a service. Virtualization combines the advantages of distributed, small, inexpensive computing with those of large, centralized servers.

Customers like having their own virtual box, and the hoster can be comfortable with the fact that each customer can have exactly the configuration they need, without version/patch conflicts, and if a customer does destroy their "box", all other customers are unaffected.

Virtually also provides some less than obvious advantages such as eliminating hardware incompatibility, having the production box be exactly the same as the development box, scalability and reliability/recovery.

Discussion of hard drive requirements - mainly an infrastructure issue to be considered. RAIS, SAN(?), S3, etc.

Now on reserve battery power; I'll publish now, and maybe update later.

Update...

Enomaly has developed vmcast to distribute VM disk images via RSS2 as an enclosure, much like a podcast can be syndicated. Enomaly's product is open source, so one can imagine many developers making a virtual machine using their own operating system [Linux or openBSD or netBSD or freeBSD or openSolaris or openVMS or, or whatever works best for them] distribution, optimized for their application with a complete stack from VM APIs to OS, database, file system, application and its APIs distributed, perhaps even updated or provisioned, via RSS as simply as getting a podcast today.

Derek gave a brief comparison of EC2 and Enamolism, and Luis Sala of Alfresco, who is an EC2 beta tester and Alfresco is an Enamoly partner, provided a demonstration of EC2.