For the last month we’ve been working on getting the perfect charm setup for the OMG! Ubuntu! website. Today we deploy the final version of the charm just in time for the 12.04 release. It’s been a long road, but now that we’ve wrapped this up it’s time to take all the knowledge we’ve gained in the past month about scaling WordPress (from caching to session management) and place it in the stock WordPress charm, making it anything but stock. What has made this otherwise grueling experience easy and enjoyable is Juju. No longer do we have to toil with different environments, upgrade paths, or even major documentation. Since we’ve encapsulated all of our tweaks in the charm, deploying and performing large upgrades is relatively streamlined.
To demonstrate how easy it is to get OMG! Ubuntu! running I’ve recorded the latest deployment on shelr.tv where I created a new environment, bootstrapped it, deployed, then re-pointed the IP address in AWS. What you see in the terminal cast is what’s running OMG! Ubuntu! right now. Compared to traditional deployments, the process is effortless. This terminal cast outlines the deployment of OMG! Ubuntu! from nothing to a running blog. Since it takes about 10 minutes to do the first deploy (imagine having to pull down about 5-10 GB worth of assets, database dumps, etc then import those in to MySQL), I decided to cut there and create this additional short video on how to scale out the deployment.
It’s a fantastic thing. Sure we’ve been rushing around trying all these different methods, but at the end of the day that time was well invested. Now deployments for OMG! Ubuntu! (and WordPress) are easy. In minutes you have a battle ready, tried and true blogging software deployed to the cloud.