Symphony.

Hi folks,

I am on the verge of changing my old dedicated servers for something better. Everybody is already familiar with the "Cloud", but what about hosting Symphony in this magnificent beast ? Did you ever tried/succeded/failed ? And why ?

I have a nice website ready to go and we have problems with the Akamai system. I am pretty sure the only thing that is not working is the session, since we really have problems with the login. Anybody ever tried Akamai with Symphony ?

It searched the forum and could not get anything talking about this and I am really curious to read your experiences.

BTW, I just registered for a free Engine Yard PHP Cloud account. We try it and see how it does.

Thanks.

Try AppFog. I have Symphony running on there. It works great so far.

I have some experience with running Symphony on the cloud via PaaS and lots of experience with running it over IaaS.

In terms of PaaS, take a look at Orchestra. They use nginx instead of Apache, so the .htaccess rewrite rule needs to be adjusted but we have worked with Orchestra to ensure that Symphony can run on their platform.

Regarding Cloud infrastructures, if you're open to IaaS, I'd recommend Standing Cloud. Soario is currently working with them to create a dedicated Symphony cloud service. Let me know if you are interested in testing it out.

I also have experience with Akamai edge delivery/CDN. Though in this instance, Rowan (buzzomatic) is the best man to speak to since he's helped manage several large projects on Akamai.

The way Akamai works is through page-level caching, and by virtue of this kind of caching solution, sessions and dynamic content is not really possible. Take a look at this article for a more detailed explanation of Akamai v.s. dynamic content.

As an alternative (though it's not a direct apples-to-apples comparison), take a look at CloudFlare.

Try AppFog.

@bzerangue I did check them out, but their pricing method based on RAM kind of sucks a little.

@Allen, Thanks for such an amazing response. I have looked Engine Yard's Orchestra, wil probably go with that.

IaaS is kind of what I want to get rid from... I did successfully deploy Symphony through Akamai, the only we had to do was to ignore the /symphony/ url from the cache and all POST resquests. Works real great!

Finally, I am a HUGE fan of CloudFlare. They rock!!! Practically all of our sites are now with CloudFlare. BTW, do you know about cdnjs ? It's run by CloudFlare and they have EVERYTHING. You can even pull request them with new librairies... Pretty awesome.

Thanks!

Thanks for that link Nitriques! I'm also a CloudFlare lover but didn't know about their library CDN.

@nathanhornby

cdnjs revolutionize how I code. It is now my first place to check for a library. I even pulled some myself. The two guys being this are really clever. Everybody wins.

• Since it's open source, they have community support for more libraries
• It's free
• CloudFlare gaters more traffic, and delivers better security.
• They provide SSL Support!!!
• Chances to get a 304 Not Modified are greater on public CDN.

And for the last reason, that's why I still use's Google's cdn for jQuery and jQueryUI.

cdnjs FTW!

I have Lemonstand running at OpenShift on their free plan. (This is mainly because Lemonstand is Apache-centric and doesn't work with Hiawatha, the webserver I use on my VPS; OpenShift uses Apache.)

When pushing new commits to OpenShift any new files added since the last push are removed/overwritten except for those in a special persistent data directory, so you need to move directories such as Symphony's manifest directory into this data directory and use symlinks from the main symphony directory to point to them. Reorganising Lemonstand in this way took me a little while because I wasn't familiar with its directory structure, but once it was done it worked fine. I think this will be straightforward to do with Symphony, and I'm planning on giving it a try sometime soon. Though, to be honest, I'm quite happy with Symphony running on my little dual-VPS setup (1: Hiawatha + PHP, 2: MySQL).

I'm not sure which caching strategies OpenShift supports. Lemonstand can be set to work with file-caching and APC and Memcache, and I'm going to investigate further.

@DavidOliver Thanks for this explanation. Do not hesitate to add more info in this thread for future reference!

@Nitriques

It's definitely an ideal option for a few of our sites, as they're being delivered by CloudFlare anyway so I imagine there must be some performance gains having all those requests on the same service.

I'd like to just pull jQuery and jQuery UI from cjnjs too, why do you say you avoid it? Surely if you're pulling the same version of jQuery the fact that it's returned as not modified is a good thing is it not?

@nathanhornby, I think that refers to the Google versions of jQuery being more popular, and so visitors being more likely to have that jQuery cached and gettting a 304.

@DavidOliver Ah, of course!

@DavidOliver or even better: not make the request at all, because the browser considers its own copy "fresh", shaving another few miliseconds off the load time :)

@creativedutchmen, Ah, yes - cool.

Thanks.