Using Subversion to Update Content with Scalr Scripts

I wanted to touch again on the use of Subversion (SVN) to populate the /var/www of app servers on Scalr.  Basically the issue is how to add your web content to a new instance once it has automagically launched a new instance due to high load.  So Scalr will launch another app role once the server reaches a load threshold you have previously set. So the issue is I can have the instance started, but once it has launched the /var/www needs to be populated for that server to be able to serve content via load balancer.

Scalr Scaling Settings

This is where SVN and Scalr Scripting come into play.  I keep all my site content in a SVN repo.  So I link to whatever production tag I want to be live at that time.  In order to get the directory populated I make a simple script to do an svn checkout of that tag to /var/www.  A simple bash script is added to do the checkout and is added to the “OnHostUp” option.  This way once the server sends its SNMP trap saying it is up the script will be executed.  This is also a helpful means of updating your servers to a newer build.  I DO NOT checkout the tag directly into /var/www instead I make a symlink to /var/svn where the tags are checked out.  So when it is time to roll out a new production tag I simply checkout the new tag to /var/svn and redo the symlink to point at new tag.  This way if there is an issue that was not forseen in the QA process I can roll back to known good tag by redoing symlink.  This is an easy but very effective way of using Scalr scripts and SVN to manage content loading on servers.

Managing EC2 Configurations Using SVN

I am a big fan of using Subversion for things other than just versioning code.  In the past I have used SVN to manage configuration files across many servers.  Making it easy to deploy and (if needed) roll back changes.  It is also a big help on development servers for PHP developers to commit changes and see them live on the development server.  This is easily accomplished using SVN hooks.  There are plenty of HowTos on this topic if seeking that information.

Now that I am up to my eyeballs in Amazon Web Services I am looking to use SVN to help me leverage the new found power of the cloud.  Now I am not saying it is a good thing to use SVN for things other than code versioning.  But it has always worked for me in many other ways as well.

Some of the things I am thinking of using SVN:

• Update DEV web server using hook scripts for devs to see changes to trunk.
• Maintain Apache and other config files for AMIs.
• Maintain code repository for versioning along with take advantage of S3 for backup and processing power of EC2.

This is a work in progress so I am looking to perfect the design to my liking soon.