Using the Amazon Cloud to host Digital Scholarship Projects

Using the Amazon Cloud to

host Digital Scholarship

ProjectsEmory University // Robert W. Woodruff Library

Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC)

Jay Varner, @jaysvarner

Stewart Varner, @stewartvarner

(some relation)

The Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC)

Collaborative Projects

Fast, experimental, cheap.

• Empower scholars to do the work themselves

• Some home-grown projects

DiSC Projects: Small

Complex projects, considerable time and/or financial commitment.

• Selection Committee

• Project Charter

• Developer Time

DiSC Projects: Bigger

Alternatives

Cost-

effective

Accommodating Stable Flexible

University

Web

Architecture

Y N Y N

University VM Y Y Y N

Library Server Y N Y N

Shared

Hosting

Service

Y N Y N

Virtual Private

Server

Y Y Y N

Elastic Cloud Y Y Y Y

What we are running in AWS

• Production

– 11 WordPress Sites

– 1 Auto publishing script

– 1 Twitter Harvest

• Dev

– Development Sites (WordPress and Django)

• Backups

– All instances and volumes are backed up in

AWS

AWS Terms

AWS How to think about it

Instance Server

EBS Volume Attached Storage

Security Group Firewall Rules

AMI Image

Snapshot Block level copy of data

AWS Terms

AWS How to think about it

Instance Server

EBS Volume Attached Storage

Security Group Firewall Rules

AMI Image

Snapshot Block level copy of data

BUT DON’T THINK THIS WAY

Architecture

• Separate system from software stack

Instance: bare system and service packages

EBS Volume: mounted to instance contains:

• Software Stack/Application files

• Database files

• Configuration files

Pros

• Scalability

• Low admin overhead

• API

• Makes experimentation easy and cheap

Cons

• Learning curve

• Fear

• Outages

• Variable bill

• Domain names/DNS

Questions?

Thanks!

stewart.varner@emory.edu // @stewartvarner

jay.varner@emory.edu // @jaysvarner

s3.amazon.aws.com/emorydisc/resources.html