Using the Amazon Cloud to host Digital Scholarship Projects Emory University // Robert W. Woodruff Library Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) Jay Stewart

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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 AccommodatingStableFlexible University Web Architecture YNYN University VMYYYN Library ServerYNYN Shared Hosting Service YNYN Virtual Private Server YYYN Elastic CloudYYYY

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 AWSHow to think about it InstanceServer EBS VolumeAttached Storage Security GroupFirewall Rules AMIImage SnapshotBlock level copy of data

AWS Terms AWSHow to think about it InstanceServer EBS VolumeAttached Storage Security GroupFirewall Rules AMIImage SnapshotBlock 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! s3.amazon.aws.com/emorydisc/resources.html