amazon's elastic compute cloud, "ec2", provides a flexible and scalable hosting option for applications. while ec2 is not inherently suited for running application stacks with relational databases such as lamp, it does provide many advantages over traditional hosting solutions.

in this article we get a sense of lamp performance on ec2 by running a series of benchmarks on the drupal cms system. these benchmarks establish read throughput numbers for logged-in and logged-out users, for each of amazon's hardware classes.

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amazon uses xen based virtualization technology to implement ec2. the cloud makes provisioning a machine as easy as executing a simple script command. when you are through with the machine, you simply terminate it and pay only for the hours that you've used.

The script checks out Drupal, sets up a database and settings.php, adds a single record for the admin user with a preset password (admin/potrzebie) and generates some content using Jeff Eaton's patched generate-content.php for devel.module.

The script must be edited for a couple of important values before being run. A future version will probably be smart and check.

Anyway, execute it from the command line as php -e install-drupal.php

http://turmoil.logrus.com/files/test-installer.tar.gz

Next steps:
Installing a patch file.
Installing simpletest.
Running a very simple test.
Extracting patches from project issues.
Auto posting followups to project module.

After that:
Xen! If Boris says it, I'm Right There.

There's also some talk of virtualization in there. I think it is a great idea.

I'm doing something similar locally because I want to get into the swing of participating in the Drupal community after spending so many years on the sidelines. I'm sick of OS X and have a virtualized Linux instance and now I'm looking to automate by way of a shell script that installs Drupal (with the option of specifying versions), installs whatever modules are needed (in case I want to work on a contrib patch), applies the patch and generates some content. After that, I'd play with the site, make sure it worked as it should and then I'd be done. In the event I had to modify anything, a second script to generate an updated patch would be called. Afterwhich, I'd run another script to run a cleanup.

I should even throw in the simpletest things that are mentioned above.

Question:
Which do you prefer to use on your Intel Mac?

Seems that VMWare's Fusion is vastly favored.