具有负载平衡的 Umbraco 8 应用程序

Question

I have an Umbraco 8.2.2 application which is hosted in AWS EC2 server.
Recently, I encounter server availability issues that caused downtimes once in a while.
One of the solutions I've thought about is to maintain an additional AWS EC2 server which hosts the same application (Same code, same database) and configure load balancing between them.
It will host both client and server.

To what extent is this possible, in your experience?
How can I handle obstacles like shared media & cache folders, as they should be the same?
I've heard about S3 as an option.
What additional obstacles may I face, and what should I put my focus on?
Thanks.

Answer 1

This sounds like a good use case for Amazon EFS which offers you a shared POSIX file system. You can mount the directories where your media and cache folders are located to the EFS share and then mount the EFS share to the backend EC2 instances that are behind the load balancer. This solution requires very little or no changes to your application itself, you will just be changing the storage media for certain files in your application.

As for obstacles, EFS is a.network filesystem, therefore, it is generally not recommended to execute code from your EFS share or to use it for applications that require very low storage latency. If that's the case then you can consider Amazon FSx but that's a very expensive solution.

If you can't avoid executing your code from EFS, just try it out and see how it affects your application's performance. EFS works fine for plenty of web application use cases. Here is a tutorial on how to host a simple website using EFS behind a load balanced environment to get you started.

If EFS is not an option, then you could try to offload your static content to Amazon S3 and serve it through CloudFront. This is probably a cheaper option and offloads a lot of traffic from your load balancer and EC2 instances but it is also probably more work because you have to refractor your application to serve your content through CloudFront. Here is a tutorial (there are plenty more online) on how to create a static website that serves content through CloudFront. In your case, you would be serving the content (ie your media files) through S3/CloudFront and then update the links used in your applications to retrieve that content from the CloudFront endpoint instead of retrieving them directly from your application/load balancer endpoint... so the work you need to do is on two fronts, setting up the S3/CloudFront environment, and configuring your application to offload the content to S3 and serve it through CloudFront.