[ckan-discuss] Installation options

[Rufus Pollock]

On 15 February 2012 10:31, James Gardner <james.gardner at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hi Simon,
>
>
>>> First post to the list, so hello, I'm Simon and I currently work in
>>> Digital
>>> Birmingham. I've been asked to look at open data platforms for the city
>>> and
>>> so have spent a bit of time looking at ckan recently after chatting to
>>> Mark
>>> Wainwright at UK Gov Camp last month.
>>>
>>> I've been following the package installation instructions here:
>>>
>>> http://docs.ckan.org/en/latest/install-from-package.html
>>>
>>> and firstly chose to install to Amazon EC2. That went really well, but
>>> the
>>> small version is going to cost me $1/day and I'd rather not pay that.
>>> I've
>>> installed ckan under a virtual machine, but that is quite painfully slow
>>> on
>>> the machine I have to use for it.
>>>
>>> I did see that there had been a discussion previously about creating an
>>> Amazon ami file for the micro EC2 instance and I wondered if that had got
>>> anywhere. There are a number of reasons why I'd rather use the Amazon
>>> install, not least that I can deploy it for others to see a lot better
>>> than
>>> on a virtual machine running under Windows.
>>
>> Just to clarify, is the reason you can't use the micro is because we
>> build for 32-bit? If so I would imagine (though could be wrong) that
>> you could install the 32-bit on 64-bit architecture without anything
>> going wrong (we may need to rebuild CKAN as no-arch but that shouldn't
>> be too hard).
>>
>> @James: could you comment on this?
>
>
> We did talk about setting up an AMI, but as you found out, it is fairly easy
> to install from packages anyway, so we never went that extra step.
>
> The packages are built for architecture "all" so work on both 32bit and
> 64bit systems. EC2 micro instances really are quite small and as CKAN has
> become more sophisticated it requires slightly more resources. I like to
> give a production CKAN instance at least 1GB RAM to ensure it runs smoothly,
> although you can use less, the performance won't be as good. If you want to
> experiment with the micro instance, you would just follow the same approach
> as for the small instance, but you'd need to find a suitable Ubuntu AMI (I
> don't know of one myself) and choose micro instance during the setup. I'd
> recommend a small instance backed by EBS though. Micro instances don't
> support EBS as far as I know, so if Amazon rebooted a micro instance for any
> reason, you'd lose all your data - probably not something you want.

Really useful info James. Just to clarify, micro instances definitely
do support EBS (in fact it can only be run off EBS ...).

Rufus