AWS, Drupal and Caching: pt.5 Onwards and upwards
Oct. 16, 2014This part of the series will be kept short, as it's more of a list of things you will likely want to do seen (and I will too). I may post some of these steps below as I do them if people find them useful for reference, just drop me a note on twitter (@retrodans) if that is the case.
Future additions (eg. S3)
- Add the Expire and Purge steps to the varnish piece: I did do this, but it's n article all on it's own. The main thing this will mean is that you can get varnish to flush it's cache in much more clever ways than hitting the 'fluch all' button or restarting varnish. It can purge urls as nodes change, or based on rules for example. Very handy for views for sure.
- Regular security updates - You will need to make updates as new security risks come out if you are maintaining your own server, the quickest and easiest way to do this is to subscribe to this rss feed http://www.debian.org/security/ Then, when something occurs, login to your box and type this (replacing packagename) to see if you need to update the package too (dpkg-query -l <packagename>) if you do, then update it.
- S3 integration - as Drupal has a files folder, and S3 is cheap, and ultimately well suited to being used my multiple servers IF we expand, then it would be great to get it working. Sadly, none of the modules quite behave at the moment. I have added an issue to monitor onto d.o though (https://www.drupal.org/node/2353487)
- Monitor and improve all caching setups
- Looking into all the spam attacks - I have a lot of traffic in my access logs going to /comment/xx it may be time to fix them soon, although fast404 should be helping reduce the load, as varnish will cache it.
- Hookup Turnkey webmin to a domain - we hid it earlier, we should get that back, as could prove handy
- Look into Turnkeys automatic security updates
- Check configuration of SUDO command
- Archive the snapshot backups which are getting made, as these happen daily, so may clog up and get expensive after a while. You could change this to only backup once per week if it is a low usage website
Mainly though, as with any web app, monitor and improve. Things may not be working as expected, so will need fixing. Have fun folks, and until next time, "play more games", I mean "code safe".