I have a django app and I would like to have an experience on scaling-up my project.
http://www.djangobook.com/en/beta/chapter21/
In this document scaling issues of django applications are explained very well but before I buy new servers I would like to try the softwares which are mentioned in the document.
Is it possible to run 4-5 virtual machines and install linux servers on each of them in my local computer and distribute database,media and source code of my application on them ?
The reason for that I would like to test the softwares like load-balancers or mysql replication tools before production enviroment.
It is not only possible but very easy. Take a look at the Vagrant1 project. It's a set of small programs built around creating/updating/managing virtual environments for software development.
Related
Finally the time has come and I'm ready to deploy my first django project.
I'm a newbie in web development stuff and now the real fun begins.
This is a low scale site for computer jobs.
I want to start with a free tier and grow from there as need emerges.
I've read some guides regarding django project deployment but could not find all answers.
so hope some guys here could help me out:
I've been thinking on getting Amazon EC2 free tier VPS, is this a good option?
my local development machine runs Ubuntu, I've read that i could install 10GB Ubuntu image, do you recommend such image?
should I go with apache or lighter web server?
My project is hosted on bitbucket, I just need to checkout my project on my VPS right?
What about data backups? I would like to backup my mySQL DB
How do you recommend me serving the static files?
I'm looking for a good tutorial on how to setup AWS with django and mysql
10x guys!
I've been thinking on getting Amazon EC2 free tier VPS, is this a good
option?
If it fufills your technology requirements, ram, cpu, memory; it is a good option.
my local development machine runs Ubuntu, I've read that i could
install 10GB Ubuntu image, do you recommend such image?
Might as well keep your environments the same if you can. If you can match up versions that is another plus
should I go with apache or lighter web server?
Either, Apache would probably be easier to deploy at this point because you don't have to worry about running it as a servicer ( using a program like like supervisor to manage it).
Whichever one you choose, there is an abundance of tutorials online describing how to set up django.
My project is hosted on bitbucket, I just need to checkout my project
on my VPS right?
That is one way. There are lots of ways to deploy. I like syncing the actual files using fabric. That way your production server doesn't need to know about your bitbucket account. Once again, there are so many tutorials online describing deploying django. Fabric is a great place to start.
What about data backups? I would like to backup my mySQL DB
There exists lots of tools for this. Plenty of premade tools and shell scripts. I have used automysqlbackup and it works great http://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/
How do you recommend me serving the static files?
Make sure the webserver serves them. If you deploy through apache you can set up an alias to serve static files very easily. You can come up with a collectstatic deployment scheme to put your static on s3, but for a simple site apache would be just fine
I'm looking for a good tutorial on how to setup AWS with django and
mysql
Perhaps you can find a tutorial that covers this, most likely you might just find a tutorial :
how to setut aws with ubuntu
Installing django / mysql on ubuntu
So I was looking at the Getting Started with Django http://gettingstartedwithdjango.com/ tutorial, and everything was done in a vm. The author set up a vm, and then created a virtualenv in the vm. Is this good practice to get started on a django project, or software projects in general? Why the need for a vm? What happens if I have more than one project - should I use two vms? Or just create additional virtualenvs in the original vm?
I'm still a student in school, and I'm working on my own personal side projects, so it'd be useful to get some input on how things are really done in the real world.
Thanks!
You do not need VMs. You can get through just fine using virtualenv with an environment for each project - especially just starting out in Django.
In the future, one of the times you may need a separate VM environment for your project is if it has a lot of unique infrastructure needs. It's much easier to setup a VM, setup the unique environment, and not have to alter it when you want to work on other projects.
Another common reason I see people using VMs is when they have a Windows machine but want to develop in Linux. It's easy to spin up a Linux VM and work there since Linux is more programmer friendly.
It's subjective. I leverage virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper for my development, which I do on Linux. There are instance where you might need to leverage two separate VMs...it just depends, although I haven't encountered this.
There's no unwritten rule that says you have to use a VM. Python (and many other languages/frameworks) simply work better on Linux, so many people will leverage VMs to run Linux on Windows or Mac to do their development in that environment.
I'm trying to set up a good development environment for a Django project that I will be working on from two different physical locations. I have two Mac machines, one at home and one at work that I do most of my development on. I currently host a Ubuntu virtual machine on one of the machines to host the Django environemnt, install DropBox on it, and edit source code from my Mac. When I save the code file, the changes get synced over DropBox to the Ubuntu VM and the Django development server automatically restarts because of the change. This method has worked well in the past, but I am starting to use DropBox for a lot of other things now and don't want all of that to be downloaded on every virtual machine I use. Plus, I want to start using Eclipse + PyDev to be able to debug code and have code completion. Currently, I use TextEdit which is great, but doesn't support debugging or completion.
So what are my options? I thought about setting up a Parallels VM on a thumb drive that has my entire environment on it (Eclipse included), but that has its own problems. Any other thoughts?
Here is the environment I set up and it has the components you are after. I have used pydev as well and it works but I prefer Komodo.
Things which I think you are missing:
An SCM - Using Dropbox works but there are some real shortcomings by not using a real version control system. Examples include reverting changes, branching, merging, etc. I agree with Simon
Using a virtualenv will really help when developing on multiple platforms.
I do ALL of this on my Mac:)
HTH
We have the need to perform tests on localized platforms that put some burden on our hardware resources because for just a few weeks we might need plenty of servers and clients (Windows 2003 and Windows 2008, Vista, XP, Red Hat, etc) in multiple languages.
We typically have relied on blades with Windows 2003 and VMWare, but sometimes these are overgrown by punctual needs and also have the issue that the acquisition and deployment process is quite slow if the environment needs to grow.
Is Amazon EC2/S3 usable in the following scenario?
Install VMWare (Desktop because we need the ability to have snapshots) on an Amazon AMI.
Load existing VMWare images from S3 and run them on EC2 instances (perhaps 3 or 4 server or client OSes on each EC2 instance.
We are more interested in the ability to very easily start or stop VMware snaphsots for relatively short tests. This is just for testing configurations, not a production environment to actually serve a user workload. The only real user is the tester. These configurations might be required for just a few weeks and then turned off for a few months until the next release requires them again.
Is EC2/S3 a viable alternative for this type of testing purpose?
Do you actually need VMWare, or are you testing software that runs in the VMWare VMs? You might actually need VMWare if you are testing e.g. VMWare deployment policy, or are running code that tests the VMWare APIs. Examples of the latter might be you are testing an application server stack and currently using VMWare to test on many platforms.
If you actually need VMWare, I do not believe that you can install VMWare in EC2. Someone will correct & enlighten me if this is not the case.
If you don't actually need VMWare, you have more options. If you can use one of the zillion public AMIs as a baseline, clone the appropriate AMIs and customize them to suit your needs (save the customized version as a private AMI for your team). Then, you can use as many of them as you like. Perhaps you already have a bunch of VMWare images that you need to use in your testing. In that case, you can migrate your VMWare image to an EC2 AMI as described in various places in Google, for example:
http://thewebfellas.com/blog/2008/9/1/creating-an-new-ec2-ami-from-within-vmware-or-from-vmdk-files
(Apologies to the SO censors for not pasting the entire article here. It's pretty long.) But that's a shortcut; you can always use the documented AMI creation process to convert any machine (VMWare or not) to an AMI. Perform that process for each VMWare VM you have, and you'll be all set. Just keep in mind that when you create an AMI, you have to upload it to S3, and that will take a lot of time for large VMs.
This is a bit of a shameless plug, but we have a new startup that may deal with exactly your problem. Amazon EC2 is excellent for on-demand computing, but is really targeted at just a single user launching production servers. We've extended EC2 to make it a Virtual Lab Management environment, with self-service, policies and VM sharing. You can check it out at http://LabSlice.com and see if it meets your needs.
Amazon provides a solution themselves now: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/12/amazon-vm-import-bring-your-vmware-images-to-the-cloud.html
We recently bought a new rack and set of servers for it, we want to be able to redeploy these boxes as build servers, QA regression test servers, lab re-correlation servers, simulation servers, etc.
We have played a bit with VMWare, VirtualPC, VirtualBox etc, creating a virtual build server, but we came across a lot of issues when we tried to copy it for others to use, having to reconfigure every new copy of the VM.
We are using Windows XP x86/x64 and Windows Vista x86/x64, so I had to rename the machine, join the domain etc for every new copy.
Ideally we just want to be able to add a new box, deploy a thin boot strap OS (Linux is fine here) to get the VM up an running, then use it.
One other thing we have limited to no budget, so free is best.
I would like to understand others experiences in doing the same thing.
FYI, I am not in systems IT, this we are group of software engineers trying to set this up.
Any links to good tutorials would be great.
The problem you're running into is the machine SID must be unique for each machine in a domain. Of course by copying an image you now break that unique constraint.
I'd suggest that you read the documentation for Sysprep in the reskit and Vista System Image Manager - your friends for XP/Win2k3 and Vista/Win2k8 respectively.
These tools enable to "reseal" your configured instance of the OS such that the next time it boots - it can prompt for information such as network configuration, machine names, admin user ID's, run scripts etc.
Also be aware that the licencing restrictions for Windows desktop clients are generally per image - not per server.
Using these tools with HyperV we created complete preconfigured instances of Win2k3 & Win2k8 that boot to finish installing Sharepoint - going further we used the diffing disks to overlay Visual Studio so our devs could use the production images for their work. It has radically changed our development process.
At this point our entire public website is run on HyperV with of 5 boxes running 15 images for a mix of soft and hard redundancy - they take several hundred million page views per week.
Another option for dealing with the SID probelm is NewSID. This is a simpler tool than sysprep, in that all it does is rename the machine and reassign the SID; if you don't need all the other features of sysprep this is a much easier tool to use.