In Practice: Agile and Scalable Site Development with Drupal, Appzero, and EC2.

Like a lot of folks, I'm excited about the possibilities that arise when you combine the agility of modern CMS's (like Drupal and Wordpress) with the scalability and administrative control offered by Compute Clouds (like Amazon EC2 and GoGrid).

In my work as VP of Technology here at AppZero, I've had the opportunity to work with a number of web site and web app developers who are trying to realize this potential. I've seen first hand that there are a lot of unwritten, but critical, details we must know to capitalize on this power.

This entry is the start of a blog series in which I'll share my viewpoint -- and I welcome your participation.

I'm going to kick off this series by sharing my experiences in developing, deploying, updating, and scaling out a Drupal installation in Amazon's EC2 Compute Cloud. I'll let you know what's worked and what's failed. I'm hoping I can make your life a little smoother so you can avoid some of the pain we've gone through -- and get right to the good part.

I'll be writing at least one entry a week.  Here's my plan:

Part 1: An agile development and deployment workflow: from your machine, to EC2, and back in 1 minute.
Part 2: Getting Drupal on your Windows machine in 5 minutes.
Part 3: Developing your site.
Part 4: Provisioning an EC2 machine.
Part 5: Moving your Drupal development site to the EC2 machine.
Part 6: Updating your Website and redeploying in a matter of seconds.
Part 7: Scaling out your website.
Part 8: Concluding comments.

Join me on this journey by commenting on the blog or writing me directly at chu@appzero.com.