Revamp

I am working on a revamp of the site. Check out my progress.

There will be lots of changes to come. I am hoping to have the new site operating by Aug 15th. Expect to here from me a lot between now and then.

Django and Logging

Thought I would capture what I learned and decided this morning regarding logging and Django.

There is some great stuff happening over at django-logging they have wrapped the standard python logging in a middleware package for django so that you can actually embed logging info in your pages. This is really great stuff, but more than I need at the moment.

You can find the world’s shortest introduction to standard python logging here. But it isn’t applied to django, and that left me with one question.

Where is django do I define my logger, so that logging can occur throughout my app. I found the answer here. You can define your logger in the settings.py, which in hindsight makes complete sense.

I am going to use the standard logging for now as I just want to use it to debug an issue. I will think about my longer term plans with respect to logging as I introduce an API.

Evening at Starbucks

I am just wrapping up now and wanted to record some of the progress I made today at Starbucks.

I have started serving my svn repository. Moved all my projects into the svn. Worked on my aws_migration project to get it to the same point I was at with my hack from the weekend. The main page is up and running.

The next step is to remove all the other dependencies on http://www.kountr.com references. We are on a staging domain but I want to make this independent from url as easily as possible.

Good progress for a couple hours.

Thank you Ace.

Note To Self

Kountr DB is restored on the new server. Django is installed and the Kountr source has been checked out from the new repository. Looks like I have some permissions issues.

I’ll have to clean this up later this week.

The WebServer

Last night I installed Apache, got it running, moved all the content directories to the EBS.

With Apach and Postgres I am not entirely confident that I have moved everything that is absolutely necessary. I need to do more reading. It only takes on config, or log file and my AMI is no longer disposal as I am intending.

I read up on how to handle multiple websites with Apache. This looks pretty easy.

I am beginning to think that there will be money to be made selling virtually hosted websites on top of ec2. Consider that the current virtual hosting for Kountr costs about six bucks a month. The smallest instance on ec2 will cost <$90 a month. The question really, is can I host 30 low traffic websites on the smallest ec2 instance.

I should do some research on how many page requests the various ec2 instances can handle per month.

The other thing I was going to mention is that a wrote a quick bash script to umount my ebs and bundle/register my AMI.

Interesting Quirk

When I created my AMI last night I had an EBS mounted at /data. I figured this was the way to do it, so that when I rehydrated later the mount would already be in place.

Today I rehydrated, tweaked some Postgres directory permissions and everything was good to go. I went to unmount /data so that I could terminate the VM and ran up against a wall. /data was not a mount point.

I went and mounted /dev/sdf and created a file and then checked /data. The file was not there.

Conclusion

Creating an image with mounts attached results in the data being a part of the AMI. So always remove EBS mounts unless you want the data to get included.

EBS and Flows

Tonight I am working on moving my DB storage into an EBS volume. Setting up the volume was pretty easy. Using the AWS console to create and attach the volume. Remember to use mkfs before mounting.

mkdir /data

mkfs /dev/sdf

mount /dev/sdf /data

su – postgres

/etc/init.d/postgresql stop

mv /var/lib/pgsql /data/pgsql

 

modified /etc/init.d/postgresql to point at new dir for PGDATA, PGLOGS

 

/etc/init.d/postgresql start

And everything seemed to work. This is enough work for one night. I am packing up my AMI and shutting this all down.

Head in the Clouds

I spent most of today trying out AWS. I am really impressed.

I created a basic AMI setup for Django. Then I stored my AMI in S3 and registered it. I then created multiple instances of it. All worked well.

I tested file transfer between the instances and was getting ~15Mb/s which suprised me.

My next step will be to refine my AMI so that all the basic software for my websites is on the AMI and the content and webapps are stored in an EBS volume.

I expect I will be writing more on this topic in the next little while.

Going Into the Cloud

So using Amazon’s Web Services isn’t my first cloud experience. I have tried out GoGrid long enough to like the idea but see enough gaps that I couldn’t use it for the intended purpose.

I am checking out AWS because I am looking to host a couple of sites and figure this was better, given the root access, than running multiple websites through another provider.

Three initial reactions;

1. AWS doesn’t seem to work with Chrome, it was constantly asking me to login (Could be my settings in Chrome)
2. Some of the AJAX pop-up dialogs in AWS are taller than my Acer Aspire One‘s screen, with no option to scroll (It turns out you can use the arrow keys to scroll)
3. AWS is still at the raw bits stage, and they are doing that well. I would love to see a start page for beginners that hides some of the initial complexity

Overall my feeling is that there is a lot of opportunity to add value utilizing AWS and delivering something new to users. I will use Kountr to learn more, I am sure some new ideas will come up.

Note to self; this article may come in handy.