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Planning a move to the cloud

The experience of setting up dozens and dozens of VPS servers individually by hand (for the first "test run" course) was "interesting", and only served to encourage me to move in a direction which I'd always looked to do eventually - the cloud.

Frankly the manual process works OK it's just that it's Not Fun and it doesn't scale very well. For my course case it's already clear that several hundred small servers will be needed, so automation is a must. In theory it's probably possible to automate the purchase and provisioning of traditional VPSs, but it's not an option with VolumeDrive.com, and of course there may be underlying physical limitation to just how much they can quickly setup.

My feeling is that I'll retain the current class set of server at VolumeDrive, but work to be able to add in further sets via (probably) Amazon's AWS. If provisioning is done right they should all work much the same, with some simple scripts used to tidy them up.

Some advantage of doing this:
  • One-stop purchasing and provisioning is the biggest issue
  • Allows more time to be spent on tutoring, rather than data-entry
  • Gaining skills to be used for other projects
Longer term I'd be keen to look at using Puppet to converge them once the initial prep is done - but that's another high learning curve, so won't happen for quite a while.

Another technical thing that I'll be investigationg is the automation of email - specifically pulling useful information from email sign-ups. Manually cutting and pasting into spreadsheet is not one of my favourite things!

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