More “Cloud” issues

Mosso’s Cloud Sites hosting environment, now the Rackspace Cloud (What was wrong with Mosso?), has worked brilliantly so far after an initial scare (see earlier post here). Last week, we reached another perceived impasse where we thought, again, that we needed a Cloud Server in order to accomplish a multi-site Drupal installation. Our programmers just couldn’t see how we could get away without shell access to the Cloud Sites environment on the Rackspace Cloud where can do more complex configuration than perhaps Drupal itself, in php, would allow.

Alas, after discussing our concerns with our Systems Administrator and chatting with someone at Rackspace (their “fanatical tech support” is still great!), we are sticking with the Cloud Sites platform. The scalability of Cloud Sites, the low cost factor and the managed environment (no server updates, Apache configuration, keeping MySQL up-to-date, etc.) is very desirable for our needs. Ironically, in reading about Cloud computing and setting up systems similar to what we’re doing, the theme was repeated over and over: “your IT or Systems folks will want more control, root access, etc.” – however, in our case, it was our Systems person who asked repeatedly: “Why do you need root access” and argued against it for the reasons I cite above (scalability, managed server environment, etc.) and ultimately convinced us that we think that indeed we do NOT need root access, at least at this point.

So, we’re diving deeply into our programming and implementation phase of preparing Drupal for ca. 70 sites, each with their own Drupal but managed from a central or master Drupal install – “Multi-site with single codebase” as it’s called in Drupalese.