Announcing Project Pantheon: Amazon EC2 AMI Packages for Drupal

We just got out of Dries's 'State of Drupal' presentation here at Drupalcon Paris. With excitement for the Drupal 7 release mounting it was an opportune time to reflect on not just how quickly Drupal is progressing, but where it is exactly this project and all of us are going. At Chapter Three we are becoming increasingly convinced that Drupal has a fast approaching destiny to run - as a developer environment or as a hosted product - on cloud infrastructure.

To that end, we have been doing a lot of work researching and hosting Drupal on Amazon's EC2 service. EC2 is ready to use, it is relatively cheap and instantly available. And, with its ability to run pre-packaged server set ups (Amazon Machine Instances, or AMI's), it allows developers and users to get a lot more power from their server architecture "out of the box" and spend their time doing more Drupal and less system administration.

With the strong interest Josh has been getting on the Project Mercury AMI, we're doubling down on the effort to create open source, fast, and dependable cloud based development and deployment environments for Drupal. The goal is to make this effort a more community focused effort and work together to create divine server packages that run in the cloud.

We're calling this effort Pantheon:

We have three Pantheon Packages available for alpha testing, they run but they are all a work in progress:

• Mercury: Liquid metal fast site hosting environment for Drupal 6 that includes Varnish and Pressflow Drupal running on a highly tuned LAMP stack. While running on a single Amazon instance, Mercury can handle over 2,000 requests per second for cached pages while mantaining a server load of 0.02.
• Vulcan: Continuous integration/testing environment for Drupal based on Hudson. When you can run 2,345 Drupal unit tests every time you commit a line of code — along with Selenium browser tests and automated coder.module compliance checks — you sleep better at night.
• Aegir: Use Aegir to deploy Drupal sites literally at the push of a button. This initial release allows users to take Aegir for a test drive without having to devote/configure a whole server for that purpose.

Get started

If you are familiar with administrating LAMP, deploying a server from a Pantheon AMI package for the first time is relatively quick and painless even if you aren't familiar with Amazon's EC2 services. From start to finish it should take approximately 15 minutes. Read our set up instructions to get started.

Get involved

All of the development work for this project will be done out in the open on the Drupal EC2 group on groups.drupal.org. Say hello on the group if you want to get involved.

Meet up in Paris at Drupalcon

We are organizing a Amazon EC2 / Project Mercury / Pantheon Birds of a Feather session at Drupalcon Paris. Come find us at 2:50PM on Friday.

You should also feel free to find Josh, Matt, or myself here at the conference if you want to learn more about Pantheon, to get in touch just shoot us an email: zack [at] chapterthree.com, josh [at] chapterthree.com, matt [at] chapterthree.com.

Follow the project

We will be posting regular updates on Project Pantheon to our blog. We are also on twitter: @pantheon_drupal.