TYPO3, memcache and nginx on amazon EC2

Amazon Web Service is a set of various services. Their scope is so wide that we couldn’t possibility describe them in a few sentences. My everyday work, however, would not be possible without two of them.

S3 - Simple Storage Service, which I will describe in another article on Content Distribution Networks in TYPO3 CMS.

EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud – used to test various configurations of any implemented solution. In your average conditions it is hard to test the application's behaviour on e.g. 6 different servers. That takes time – either in the server room or in-house – and always involves costs and wasted time. EC2 allows us to run any number of server units, and the low cost allows us to experiment as much a

One of those experiments involves an amalgam of CMS TYPO3, Apache, memcache and nginx. Amongst the multitude of tools offered by Amazon, there’s also a service allowing you to prepare your own AMI (Amazon Machine Images), a fully preconfigured version of almost any OS. My tinkering resulted in a publicly available AMI named ubuntu-8.04.2-typo3-nginx-memcache.manifest.

Upon running the AMI, copy its public DNS name to view the memcache page. Logon to BE TYPO3 as normal. If a BE session exists, nginx skips memcache, so it may be beneficial to run the tests on two different browsers.

I encourage you to register for an AWS account and take the ubuntu-8.04.2-typo3-nginx-memcache.manifest for a spin, among other things.