[LRUG] about lightweight server management

[Hemant Kumar]

Hello,

On 22-Apr-2013, at 9:09 PM, MG Lim <mglim at mirageglobe.com> wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> I wonder if there any good lightweight management methods/or guidelines that tend to work best for running multiple small vms for small sinatra apps (something I am trying at the moment.and shifting from heroku to get more control)?
> 
> This question might be quite wide but I am looking for any good suggestions for managing the spinup and backup of small vms that runs 1~2 web apps per instance in AWS.
> 
> I see quite some discussions of using Fog / Puppet / Capistano / or hybrid and getting a bit confused on any proven best (or goodish) practises? I havent yet tried passenger; so any suggestions on that route is also welcome.
> 
> Ideally to summarise:
> 
> 1) running php along side thin on the same instance with Nginx. (good or not)?
> 2) running a small mongodb in each vm. so that each solution is contained in 1 instance.
> 3) replicating it for balancing.
> 
> many thanks! :D

For small number of VMS I recommend using following combination:

1. Use Chef-Solo for Provisioning: Chef Solo is *really* easy to start with.  Using Chef you can manage dependencies that your VMs require, manage configuration for Nginx, Unicorn, Mongo etc and it is dead easy to use (http://railscasts.com/episodes/339-chef-solo-basics).

2. For deployment - Use Capistrano, again you should be able to pretty much deploy everything using Capistrano.  But use it for your Rails & Rack apps.

3. Use Upstart (And foreman) - A fresh Ubuntu install already comes with a monitoring system built-in. You can define your services in a Procfile (https://github.com/ddollar/foreman) and Ubuntu will ensure that they are running and they start on reboot etc. Granted, it won't do run away memory management (or CPU), but in 70% of the cases I have found Upstart to be adequate. However if you want more, you can look into god/bluepill/monit.

I find puppet still slightly complicated and Fog is just a ruby library for managing cloud. It is a low level library that powers many high level libraries. 


---
Cheers
Hemant
Co Founder, http://www.codemancers.com




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