OblakSoft
Founders BLOG
WordPress on S3: DNS and HTTPS configuration
Getting a WordPress-on-S3 website up and running is a piece of pie with our step-by-step guide, but making the website live requires a couple more pieces of the puzzle to fit together.
Today I’m going to talk about configuring DNS and HTTPS for WordPress on S3. DNS stands for Domain Name System and it is the technology that makes it possible to use friendly names for web sites. HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure and it is the technology that makes secure connections possible.
MySQL 5.6: an inside perspective
MySQL 5.6 through the eyes of a custom storage engine MySQL plugin
MySQL is famous for its pluggable storage engine architecture which allows a DBA or an application developer to choose the right engine for the task. An application uses MySQL API and is isolated from all of the low-level implementation details at the storage level. As an example, the Cloud Storage Engine (ClouSE) enables existing MySQL applications to use cloud storage such as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage to store its data. The application doesn’t need to be changed or even redeployed: with ClouSE, remote cloud storage will look like a better (ultra-scalable, durable, always-on) alternative to the local storage.
As you may already know, ClouSE now supports MySQL 5.6 release series. See this announcement for more detail. Let’s go through the set of changes that were required on the ClouSE side in order to keep up with core MySQL 5.6 changes.
We had to adapt our code to compile and work with MySQL 5.6 while keeping 100% compatibility with MySQL 5.5. As much as we could, we tried to fix the code in a way that would work with both release series, but there are cases where the code has to be conditionally compiled for each release series.
Here is the list of MySQL 5.6 breaking changes and our solutions, in no particular order.
MySQL on Cloud Storage: do it yourself with one command
Cloud Storage Engine (ClouSE) installation and configuration is now fully automated. Try new ClouSE installer and you’ll have cloud storage access configured in no time.
OblakSoft is pleased to announce the release of Cloud Storage Engine (ClouSE) installer that can be used to deploy and configure ClouSE with your MySQL server. Now ClouSE can be deployed with just one command. The installer will guide the user through the configuration process, prompt for Cloud Storage connection parameters, and install ClouSE into MySQL.
Presented is a step-by-step guide for ClouSE installation and configuration, from downloading the binaries to running the installer. The guide was designed by request of WordPress-to-Cloud users, however it is fully applicable to any generic ClouSE installation.
The slides have notes, they are a little hard to discover with the SlideShare interface, look for a tab below the slide that looks like “Notes on Slide #”.
Let us know how we can further streamline cloud adoption for your MySQL applications.
WordPress on S3: going pro
WordPress-on-S3 makes professional website administration as easy as pie.
OblakSoft is pleased to announce availability of the ready-to-run WordPress-on-S3 / Yapixx AMI with enhanced configuration, performance, and website administration features. Now website owners can use Webmin and phpMyAdmin for secure website administration over the Internet, and pre-configure Cloud Storage Connection for the instance.
WordPress on Google Cloud Storage: step-by-step
By popular demand, here is the step-by-step guide for configuring WordPress with Google Cloud Storage.
The slides have notes, they are a little hard to discover with the SlideShare interface, look for a tab below the slide that looks like “Notes on Slide #”.
WordPress on S3: how to prevent hotlinking
Now that you use Amazon S3 to store and serve media files in scalable fashion, how would you prevent undesirable hotlinking to your files?
Hotlinking to cloud storage URLs
Hotlinking (or direct linking, inline linking) is when other sites link to or embed the image (or other media file, e.g. video) directly without providing a link to the source page. Oftentimes hotlinking happens without meaning any harm: people just want to share a picture with their Facebook friends, or post it to forums they like or etc. Regardless of intention, though, hotlinking may be harmful to your business: the media file gets downloaded from your site and consume the bandwidth that you pay for, but the user doesn’t get to see your page depriving you of ad revenue, etc.
With WordPress-to-Cloud solution all media files are stored in the cloud storage such as Amazon S3. Now it is the cloud storage (and not your web server) that serves the images and other media files. Even though this approach reduces load on your web server and hotlinking is unlikely to cause scalability problems, you are still paying for the bandwidth.
MySQL BLOB meets Amazon S3: advanced Weblob features
Advanced Weblob operations help to use Weblobs most effectively.
Weblob recap
In an earlier post I introduced Weblobs. Weblob is a new data type that is supported by the Cloud Storage Engine for MySQL (ClouSE). To a database developer, a WEBLOB behaves (almost) like a regular BLOB. However, in addition to the regular BLOB functionality, Weblobs can be downloaded directly from Amazon S3 by HTTP URLs.
In MySQL, a Weblob is expressed via a pair of BLOB fields that have a special naming convention: field_name$wblob and field_name$wblob_info. The latter field is what provides the Weblob functionality. It can be used to retrieve the direct Amazon S3 URL for the BLOB content.
But why does the field_name$wblob_info field have the $wblob_info suffix and not $wblob_url suffix? Can it do more than just retrieve direct URLs? It actually can.