I’ve been working on a cloud based (AWS EC2 ) PHP Web Application, and I’m struggling with one issue when it comes to working with multiple servers (all under an AWS Elastic Load Balancer). On one server, when I upload the latest files, they’re instantly in production across the entire application. But this isn’t true when using multiple servers – you have to upload files to each of them, every time you commit a change. This could work alright if you don’t update anything very often, or if you just have one or two servers. But what if you update the system multiple times in one week, across ten servers?
What I’m looking for is a way to ‘commit’ changes from our dev or testing server and have it ‘pushed’ out to all of our production servers immediately. Ideally the update would be applied to only one server at a time (even though it just takes a second or two per server) so the ELB will not send traffic to it while files are changing so as not to disrupt any production traffic that may be flowing to the ELB . What is the best way of doing this? One of my thoughts would be to use SVN on the dev server, but that doesn’t really ‘push’ to the servers. I’m looking for a process that takes just a few seconds to commit an update and subsequently begin applying it to servers. Also, for those of you familiar with AWS , what’s the best way to update an AMI with the latest updates so the auto-scaler always launches new instances with the latest version of the software?
There have to be good ways of doing this….can’t really picture sites like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, etc. going through and updating hundreds or thousands of servers manually and one by one when they make a change.
Thanks in advance for your help. I’m hoping we can find some solution to this problem….what has to be at least 100 Google searches by both myself and my business partner over the last day have proven unsuccessful for the most part in solving this problem.
Alex
