Horizontal Scaling for your Drupal App on AWS

Serving up spikes or even rolling waves of traffic?  Horizontal scaling of your Drupal application is eminently achievable, and AWS provides excellent infrastructure to do so.  This session will talk through how to get it done.  We'll focus on the application and AWS console side of things as opposed to building the AMI(s), with topics including:

• The "Cattle, Not Pets" paradigm shift
• AWS CLI
• Static file management
• Handling build artifacts (aggregated CSS/JS)
• Handling mail
• Drush and Cron considerations with multiple webheads
• Deployment workflows/automation
• Scaling workflows/automation

We'll walk through a case study of the Cascade Bicycle Club -- the largest bicycling club in the country with more than 16,000 active members and a substantially larger community across the Puget Sound. Cascade's Drupal application processes the vast majority of the organization's revenue, including large spikes of transactional traffic around opening dates for their wildly-popular events.