OblakSoft
S3
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 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 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.
WordPress on S3: now with CDN
OblakSoft is pleased to announce the release of the 1.1.x version of the WP2Cloud WordPress plugin. This release allows using a Content Distribution Network (CDN), such as Amazon CloudFront, to make content delivery even faster.
The WP2Cloud WordPress plugin now has an option to specify a Content Distribution URL. When the URL is specified, WP2Cloud redirects cloud storage URLs to point to the CDN. The CDN then serves the media files from locations around the world to provide the best performance.
The CDN must be configured correspondingly, so that it uses the cloud storage as the origin. The step-by-step instructions to configure Amazon CloudFront for WordPress on S3 / Yapixx are available here:
WordPress on S3 / Yapixx AMI with CDN support is available for FREE at http://www.oblaksoft.com/downloads/.
See also
WordPress on S3: run a beautiful website on Amazon cloud storage.
WordPress on S3: how it works.
WordPress on S3: run it anywhere.
WordPress on S3: no more backups.
MySQL with ClouSE is the first Secure Database in the Cloud
Want to learn how you can store your sensitive data in the cloud storage? Take a look at the thorough and honest security analysis of the approach you can take to deploy your existing MySQL workloads to cloud.
keep reading in August issue of Hackin9 security magazine.
