Loft Your Web Platform Into the Clouds with Immutable Infrastructure

Noticing that you automatically scaled up to double your normal footprint and back down after a wave of high traffic passed is a great feeling, especially if you only notice it on Monday morning when you look back at the weekend’s traffic in your monitoring system. Being able to use autoscaling systems to horizontally scale the web tier of your Drupal web platform is a great outcome, but getting to that point requires some planning and rigor in your build and automation processes.

The concept of immutable infrastructure revolves around building immutable deployment artifacts and then promoting them through your environments so that you can horizontally scale your web tier. These immutable deployment artifacts can be machine images or Docker images.

Phase2 has helped major media customers and sports leagues set up and maintain autoscaling infrastructures for their digital web platforms that include Drupal, and in this talk we will talk about the requirements for implementing an autoscaling environment in a public cloud like Amazon’s EC2, as well as discussing how this translates into the use of Docker and an application scheduler.

In this talk, we’ll go over the following topics:

• How to set up a build process to produce machine images (e.g. AMIs) or Docker images

• How to use autoscaling in practice to save money and be able to automatically handle traffic spikes

• Hear about our experiences implementing these solutions for major media and sports leagues

• How to handle horizontal autoscaling of Docker containers in production using Kubernetes