A Few Questions…

Great questions and thank you for your interested in the technology!

> BuddyPress
Yes, the BuddyPress should just work

> Is it possible to move my whole site to AWS
There are several deployment options. You can move the site hosting (compute) to Amazon AWS and site data (storage) to Amazon S3. Or you can choose to only migrate the content of your site to Amazon S3 while continuing to host the site wherever you host it today. Alternatively you can decide to only store your media files at the cloud storage.

> current host
Let’s see if I understood your question correctly.

Typically in many WordPress installations the webserver also performs the role of a database server. If you’d like to rely on AWS compute services to run your webserver, you may consider use our ready-to-run WordPress-on-S3 AMI, which essentially contains the preinstalled up-to-date stack + WP2Cloud components + admin tools.
If you expect to launch a tier of webservers with WordPress connecting to the database server with MySQL+ClouSE, you can use our MySQL-on-S3 AMI as your database server.

> Webmin and phpMyAdmin
You are absolutely right. After helping many customers install these tools on their sites, we decided to simplify site management by shipping them preinstalled and ready to use.

>licensing
We have not finalized the pricing policies for the GA build of ClouSE. However the price is going to be comparable with what customers pay for the backup software today. Please contact us for more details.

> Backups
Thanks for asking. We are finalizing the release of a new fairly substantial block of functionality in ClouSE – Point-in-time recovery.

We’ve declared “no more backups” strategy earlier and now we’ve completed it by offering data protection natively by the database. PIT recovery would allow a DBA to revert the database to any transaction within the user-specified data retention period. Data retention is going to be on by default, providing proactive data protection that safeguards the user from any accidental or malicious data mismanagement.

Since with WordPress-to-Cloud the whole WordPress site is stored in the cloud, WordPress becomes truly backup-less.

>What is the easiest way to restore the site once it is running on AWS
Whenever you make changes to the software on your site (e.g. install new plugin or change passwords), make sure to snapshot it. That’ll be your “golden” website image (AMI). Hopefully you also keep you private keys to access your AMI stored somewhere safe.
Once you do that, you can relax as you don’t need to worry about backing up your site’s content. The site content is stored in a highly durable (Amazon S3 is 12 9s) cloud storage, so your data is safe at all times.

• If you were to lose the site EC2 instance, just spin up another one off your “golden” AMI.
• In case of the data mismanagement (e.g. db admin called “drop table” on a wrong table or a hacker did) you’ll be able to go to any particular point in time that is within the retention period.

> Benefits
ClouSE acts as a database gateway for cloud storage. It combines the best of local and cloud storage by delivering performance and security of local storage, plus all the benefits that are unique to the cloud storage – such as high durability, high availability, high reliability, scale, infinite capacity, and storage elasticity.

As a result WordPress-to-Cloud solution gives a facelift to WordPress by removing many roadblocks on the way of scalability, reliability, availability and manageability:

• Scalability: We made WordPress stateless. Media is stored on cloud storage, not on the web tier file system. This makes it possible to auto-scale and auto-balance WordPress web tiers.
• Reliability: Cloud storage acts as a single master thus eliminating the need in replication on the database level. This also increased availability of the data.
• Availability: Data no longer needs to follow the webserver as cloud storage is available from anywhere. WordPress-to-Cloud webserver can run on premise, at any hoster or IaaS provider. You can even host your website at Google Cloud Storage but your data in Amazon S3 or vice versa. Never before had you these choices.
• Manageability: By consolidating both website content and media on the cloud storage it allows to take full advantage of cloud storage. E.g. by storing site content on the highly durable cloud storage the website no longer needs a backup.

You asked excellent questions, thank you.

Please try our product out and we’ll be happy to address any additional feedback or questions you might have.

-Artem

Artem,
No, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions! And if you can answer just a few more, no huge rush, it would be very much appreciated since I like the direction this is going in.

> Is it possible to move my whole site to AWS
If, for example, a site is able to gather a reasonable mass of users and still using their existing hosting provider, depending on the host package they have, couldn’t that end up be a huge bottleneck and force to use the Cloud for processing power sooner rather than later? Sorry, dreaming big here, and just trying to look at the big picture and seeing where issues may lie. ??

Also, when you mentioned “Or you can choose to only migrate the content of your site to Amazon S3 while continuing to host the site wherever you host it today.” what content are you referring to? The reason I ask, after that statement you referred to media files, so I’m not too sure what content you are referencing here.

> current host
Makes sense. But how difficult would it be to move from the WordPress AMI to the MySQL AMI? Meaning, if a person started out with the WordPress only version, then decided to upgrade to the MySQL version, will tears be flowing by the end of the day?? ?? Also, if I may ask, do you have a link to where I can learn of the added benefits of the MySQL over the WP version?

That’s all.

Thanks again

>content
Whenever I am talking about site content, I mean all dynamic content: webpage, metadata (such as users, revisions, etc) and media files. In traditional WordPress install website pages are stored in MySQL db, while media files – on the local file system. With ClouSE you can choose to persist all of the content in the cloud storage and use cloud storage to serve media files.

>reasonable mass of users and still using their existing hosting provider
There is no magic. While cloud storage serving uploads reduces the load on the webserver, everything has its limits. You stretch webserver while the hardware lets you. Then you spin off more webservers and move db handling to the database server, which is now easy with the stateless WordPress-to-Cloud. Then you scale out your db tier.

> how difficult move from the WordPress AMI to the MySQL AMI
trivial as you don’t need to move any data around. I can send you the instructions.

Okay, we’re on the same page with those responses. Again, I just like to be sure I know what people mean so I have no questions about it down the road. In other words, some people call me a PITA, while others understand it’s best to learn and understand to make life that much easier. ??

Artem, I can’t make any promises at this very moment, but I already have an AWS account and as long as I can complete this project (site) I will give OblakSoft a try and look forward to seeing what other exciting products your talented team is up to. Because even though I’m not completely programmer savvy, though slowly learning, you guys have a lot of brain power behind your product and ideas, without a doubt, and wouldn’t mind tagging along to see if I can utilize that b p. <<No need to comment ??

And for the very, very last question: If and when the time comes (I’m sure I’ll make it happen!), is there a certain person you think I should contact with any further ‘how-to’ setup questions and the like??

no problem, I am sure a lot of people have very similar questions.

ClouSE is the only database gateway to cloud storage on the market, making cloud storage available for OLTP workloads, so you need to stretch a bit your imagination and try it, to believe it. Luckily after installation is over, it behaves pretty much like a standard MySQL – the applications (such as WordPress) do not notice the difference and do not require code change.

Please don’t hesitate asking more questions on support forum or by emailing us at https://www.oblaksoft.com/about-us/email-us/.

Yup, I agree, I do see the uniqueness your product offers. Give me a little more time and I’ll hopefully be added to the list of current users. I will, however, be using the contact us link in the next few weeks to learn of the fees to maintain your service. Otherwise, I’ll be around again in the near future. And thanks for your help thus far, much appreciated. Talk soon…