So hit a roadblock about code deploy. This was taken considering we update the files. Later realized that we might have user generated content/content added by admin via the Drupal CMS backened. In that case those files for example images will be saved on the one particular EC2 and during a scale down the instance could go down, or may not be available in the newly booted up instance.

Luckily Amazon have another service called Elastic File System used for such cases! I now moved the sites folder of drupal to EFS.

So basic Drupal core files on the EC2 AMI image i created, plus sites folder on EFS, with auto enabling that on each loaded instance by adding the below script:

#cloud-config package_upgrade: true packages: - nfs-utils runcmd: - mkdir -p /var/www/html/efs-mount-point/ - chown ec2-user:ec2-user /var/www/html/efs-mount-point/ - echo "$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone).file-system-id.efs.aws-region.amazonaws.com:/ /var/www/html/efs-mount-point nfs4 nfsvers=4.1,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,hard,timeo=600,retrans=2 0 0" >> /etc/fstab - mount -a -t nfs4

I am hoping to do a video tutorial this weekend about the whole setup

@Dashrender said in Windows VM in the cloud:

I do realize that, but if the system works on LInux, it will probably work anywhere. 😉

That's not solid logic. Lots of things run on Linux but not in a browser.

@MattSpeller said in How this IT Team Became Heroes:

Isn't it an iron clad rule that there are no heros in IT?

There was that great thread on SW years ago, I wish that I had the link, where there were hundreds of responses to "who is your IT hero" and not one, literally, not a single one, mentioned someone who worked in IT except for one...and the thing that made him their hero wasn't his IT work but his writing and not his writing about IT but his writing about time management. Zero IT people made the list. All marketing, sales or software people... and one writer.

After signing up, you can go to My Membership to cancel the auto-renewal so you don't forget and get charged.

@scottalanmiller said:

What does Drush do? What requirements does it have that keep it from getting installed?

Drush is a CLI tool for Drupal. You can pretty much manage your whole site with it. But you need root access (or sudo).

If you update Drupal manually on shared hosting you pretty much have to back up the whole site, redownload the new Drupal version, reupload your sites folder (where all your info is), change the DB settings file, and chmod it.

With drush you type drush up drupal and you're done.

Or if you want to update everything (modules and themes also) type drush up

It's more of a pain with shared hosting to do all of that also.

@antonit said:

I am referring to the following:

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional
AWS Certified Developer - Associate
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional

Which one of these would fit the bill better for my career?

Solutions Architect is not what you have done in the past and not where you are looking at being currently. So those are more for a change in career direction more than anything.

The Developer is not at all what you do, so that is out.

DevOps, likewise, would be a major career change. Not a bad one, but it's a very different role and would be a long term transition.

SysOps Admin would be the logical starting point as it leverages where you have been and where you have been thinking of going.

For all of them, Associate is the starting point, you would do that before considering the Professional level.

@John-Nicholson has a lot of info about the red headed stepchild that is SFU.

@Carnival-Boy said:

I agree that the term "unlimited" is often abused though. I don't know if it's the same in the US, but we had a big problem over here with ISPs offering "unlimited" internet usage that was actually capped. I think the term was "Unlimited - subject to fair usage policy" where fair usage was an arbitrary figure set by the ISP.

Is that not protected by the Trades Description Act?

I second Digital Ocean. They have 1 click installers for wordpress.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/one-click-install-wordpress-on-ubuntu-14-04-with-digitalocean