Mike Gifford's picture

I want to consolidate things more and streamline our implementations.  Ideally we'd be able to have a single base install which we could use on different frameworks.  We've got a bunch of customizations that we do (nothing too deep mind you), but I'd really like to have an implementation that we can customize & deploy where we want and when we want it.

I don't want to have to start from scratch each time.  With cloud servers it's especially important to be able to clone deploy instances. 

I'd like to be able to have the same configs (LDAP, user directories, PEAR versions, varnish configs, etc.) done across the board.  

I want to be able to run a master on VirtualBox & then deploy that directly to the cloud when we want to launch a new server.

This all seems to to be much more diifficult than I think it should be. Why do we have to start from scratch when launching new servers on Amazon?

I'm curious about Turnkey and like a lot of what you have to say.  Quite happy to use your services to make this easier.

Forum: 
Jeremy Davis's picture

You could have a version of Core (or whatever common appliance you wish to use) running on your VBox and then backup using TKLBAM, then launch a server with that backup pre-integrated. I haven't actually tested this specific scenario but it shold be possible (on a local install it warns against restoring a backup from a different appliance but allows it - I'm not sure how this works with a restore on boot cloud server). So you could have a generic backup that is applied to any new server you launch, then customise that specific appliance as you like and in turn use that backup as a template for any further appliances based on that one. So for example you could have a common LAMP backup/template, a common Drupal backup template but then you can have each running server with it's own 'real' backup (ie a backup just for that server, not a template as such).

Sorry my explanation is a little convoluted. Do you follow?

Mike Gifford's picture

Ok, I started with http://www.turnkeylinux.org/drupal6 but that's just an appliance in TurnkeyLinux.

I've already Deployed  this appliance in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

I'm guessing I can just runthe backup from the cloud to push it to the S3 server:

cloud root@drupal6 ~# tklbam-backup

But I'm not sure where to find that image to download.  I can restore it, but not see a way of downloading it from here:
  https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/backups/

or even in Amazon:
  https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/home

I'm a bit puzzled by this as I am not sure where in S3 the backup is going.  

I do think I follow. Just trying to dig into the specifics.  I'm not quite sure now how to restore. From the docs it seems that it might be possible to do it through webmin:
  http://www.turnkeylinux.org/tklbam

Although I'm not sure how to configure the backup or restore to do anything different than push it to/from S3.
 
But yes, the template model is definitely one I'm looking for.  I'd like to be able to quickly clone (local or in the cloud) test, and then deploy.
 
Thanks for your help!
Jeremy Davis's picture

Just a quick response. I think at least most of this may have been covered in other recent posts.

You can use the Hub to launch new AWS servers which will auto include a specific TKLBAM backup. This is a really useful way to go when working on a local development instance (say in Vbox) and you want to migrate it to the cloud.

Restore is possible with Webmin but also via commandline or when lauching an AWS instance (as above). You can use either Webmin or the Hub to see your backups. Note though that if you do backups to local or non-S3 remote storage then you don't have this feature and you are somewhat operating in the dark.

Mike Gifford's picture

Hopefully there's improved support & documentation for other options rather than S3 in the future.  That being said it's pretty good right now for most folks.  

Jeremy Davis's picture

But TBH I don't think it's a priority for the devs so I wouldn't hold your breath if I were you. Having said that, it is open source, so if you sharpen up your Linux skills you could have a play with the code and make it work the way you want. If the TKL devs like it, they may even integrate it back into their code and it could become the default!

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