Scalable and high availability Plone hosting with Amazon EC2 for Rice University's Enterprise Rhaptos open education platform

What

Rhaptos is the Plone-based open source software that powers the popular educational materials portal CNX.org which receives 1-1.6 million visitors every month from all over the world. As a very popular resource for so many people, it's imperative that the site is architected for high availability. With data centers in Houston near hurricane territory, it was critical to have a backup plan for where to host the site in the event that the data center was destroyed.

This talk is a case study for how Rice University together with external consultants came up with a virtualization of the Rhaptos platform, to be able to quickly launch new instances on Amazon EC2. The deployment was completely automated for both multi-server production environments as well as one-off demo and testing instances. We'll show you how this was done and the tools and methods we used to make a rock solid solution.

Who

Nate Aune

Jazkarta

Nate Aune is a veteran of the Plone community, having built his first Plone site in 2002, organized a dozen Plone coding sprints and served three terms on the Plone Foundation board. Nate travels all around the world evangelizing Plone and conducting trainings on Plone. Nate is the founder and president of Jazkarta, a Boston-based consulting firm that specializes in Plone and Python-based web application development.

Whether it's teaching video activists about open source tools in the jungles of Indonesia, extreme programming with sprinters on a mountaintop in Austria, or brainstorming with a customer about new ways to improve their website, Nate brings passion and dedication to everything he does.