Tag: cloud

Alternate Symbols
I like to remotely host my SVGs and then call them in my code. For the most part, this works well, and I wrote out some basic code to check if they’re defined and accessible before displaying.

But what if you wanted your fallback to be a font-icon?

And remember, you want your code to be DRY as a bone. So no repeating chunks of code all over the place, please and thank you.

The Code

There is but ONE requirement here. You have to define HALFELF_SYMBOLICONS_PATH as the path to your SVGs. In my case, mine is something like http://my-cool-icons.objects-us-west-1.dream.io/svgs/ because I’m using DreamObjects for them. Any cloud host works great for this, mind you.
```
function halfelf_symbols( $svg = 'square.svg', $fontawesome = 'fa-square' ) {	

	$icon = '<i class="fa ' . $fontawesome . '" aria-hidden="true"></i>';

	if ( defined( 'HALFELF_SYMBOLICONS_PATH' ) ) {
		$response      = wp_remote_get( HALFELF_SYMBOLICONS_PATH );
		$response_code = wp_remote_retrieve_response_code( $response );
		
		if ( $response_code == '200' ) {
			$get_svg      = wp_remote_get( LP_SYMBOLICONS_PATH . $svg );
			$response_svg = wp_remote_retrieve_response_code( $get_svg );
			$icon         = ( $response_svg == '200' )? $get_svg['body'] : 'square.svg';
		}
	}

	return $icon;
}
```
This checks for the existence of the server used and if the actual icon exists before it sets things.

Usage Example

In my code, I define it like this:
```
$icon  = halfelf_symbols( 'users.svg', 'fa-users' );
$title = '<span role="img" aria-label="users" title="Users" class="TEMPLATE users">' . $icon . '</span>';
```
This sets the icon and then calls the span which will help make this more accessibility friendly. I could have coded the span into the function, but since I often have it all dynamically generated, it worked more sustainably this way.

In this example, I call it like this:
```
the_archive_title( '<h1 class="page-title">' . $title . '</h1>' );
```
And voila. Icons in my page title.
10 October, 2017
Remotely Hosting SVGs
I prefer to use SVGs whenever possible instead of pngs or font icons. They can be resized, they can be colored, and they’re relatively small. But I also have a set of 700 icons I use and I don’t want to have to copy them to every single site. Instead, I’d like to have them all on a central repository and call them remotely.

To The Cloud

You can use S3 or really anything for this, but I chose DreamObjects since it’s open source and I work for DreamHost.

For this to work, you create a bucket in DreamObjects with whatever name you want. I tend to name them after the website I’m working on, but in this case I’m making what is essentially a media library so a better bucket name would be the service. Keep in mind, while you can make a DNS alias like media.mydomain.com for this, you cannot use that with https at this time. Sucks. I know.

On DreamObjects, the accessible URL will be BUCKET.objects-us-east-1.dream.io — hang on to that. We’ll need it in a bit.

Upload Your Files

Since I plan to use this as a collective for ‘media’ related to a network of sites, I named the bucket for the network and then made subfolders:
- backups
- site1
- site2
- svg
- svgcolor
Backups is for everything you’re thinking. Site1 and Site2 are special folders for files unique to those domains only. Think large videos or a podcast. Since they’re not updated a lot, and I want them accessible without draining my server resources, the cloud is perfect. I separated my SVG files into two reasonable folders, because I plan to generate a list of these later.

Calling An Individual File

This is the much easier part. In general, PHP can use file_get_contents() for this. But we’re on WordPress and there is a more reliable way about this.
```
$svg = wp_remote_get( 'https://BUCKET.objects-us-east-1.dream.io/svg/ICON.svg' );
if ( $svg['response']['code'] !== '404' ) {
	$icon = $svg['body'];
}
```
By using wp_remote_get it’s possible to check if the file exists before displaying the content of the body. Which is, indeed, how one displays the content.

The reason, by the way, we want to use wp_remote_get and not file_get_contents is that there’s no way to check if the file exists with the latter. You could still use file_get_contents to display the file, but once you’ve done the remote get, you may as well use it.

Getting a List Of All SVGs

I’d done this before with local images, getting a list of all the SVGs. You can’t do a foreach of a remote folder like that. So this is a little messier. You’ll need the Amazon AWS SDK for PHP for this. I’ve tested this on the latest of the 2 branch – 2.8.31 – and the 3 branch – 3.32.3 and the code is different but can work.

In both cases, I downloaded the .phar file and included it in a function that I used to save a file with a list of the image names in them. By doing that, I can have other functions call the file and not have to query DreamObjects every time I want to get a list.
```
function get_icons() {
	include_once( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/aws.phar' );

	$svgicons = '';

	// AWS SDK Code Goes Here

	$upload_dir = wp_upload_dir();
	$this_file  = $upload_dir['basedir'] . '/svgicons.txt';
	$open_file  = fopen( $this_file, 'wa+' );
	$write_file = fputs( $open_file, $svgicons );
	fclose( $open_file );
}
```
I left out the SDK code. Let’s do that now.

SDK V2

The V2 is actually what’s still officially supported by CEPH, but the PHAR file is larger.
```
	Version 2
	$client = Aws\S3\S3Client::factory(array(
		'base_url' => 'https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io',
		'key'      => AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID,
		'secret'   => AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY,
		'version' => 'latest',
		'region'  => 'us-east-1',
	));

	$files = $client->getIterator( 'ListObjects', array(
		'Bucket' => 'BUCKET',
		'Prefix' => 'svg/',
	));


	foreach ( $files as $file ) {
		if ( strpos( $file['Key'], '.svg' ) !== false ) {
			$name         = strtolower( substr( $file['Key'] , 0, strrpos( $file['Key'] , ".") ) );
			$name         = str_replace( 'svg/', '', $name );
			$symbolicons .= "$name\r\n";
		}
	}
```
SDK V3

I would recommend using V3 if possible. Since you’re only using it to get data and not write, it’s fine to use, even if it’s not supported.
```
	// Version 3
	$s3 = new Aws\S3\S3Client([
		'version' => 'latest',
		'region'  => 'us-east-1',
		'endpoint' => 'https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io',
		'credentials' => [
			'key'    => AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID,
			'secret' => AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY,
		]
	]);

	$files = $s3->getPaginator( 'ListObjects', [
		'Bucket' => 'BUCKET',
		'Prefix' => 'svg/',
	]);

	foreach ( $files as $file ) {
		foreach ( $file['Contents'] as $item ) {
	
			if ( strpos( $item['Key'], '.svg' ) !== false ) {
				$name = strtolower( substr( $item['Key'] , 0, strrpos( $item['Key'] , ".") ) );
				$name = str_replace( 'svg/', '', $name );
				$symbolicons .= "$name\r\n";
			}
		}
	}
```
Side Note…

If you’re on DreamHost, you’ll want to add this to your phprc file:
```
extension=phar.so
detect_unicode = Off
phar.readonly = Off
phar.require_hash = Off
suhosin.executor.include.whitelist = phar
```
That way it knows to run phar files properly. And by the way, that’s part of why phar files aren’t allowed in your WordPress plugins.

Which is Better?

That’s a difficult question. When it comes to loading them on the front end, it makes little difference. And having them on a CDN or a cloud service is generally better. It also means I don’t have to push the same 400 or so files to multiple servers. On the other hand, calling files from yet another domain gets you a down check on most site speed checks… But the joke’s on them. The image is loaded in PHP.

Of course the massive downside is that if the cloud is down my site can be kinda jacked. But that’s why using a check on the response code is your lifeline.
16 August, 2017
Listing Everything on DreamObjects
I was asked about listing everything in a DreamObjects bucket, which is practically the same thing as listing everything in an Amazon S3 bucket, just on a different server.

This isn’t as easy as we’d like, because while there is a nice Amazon S3 PHP class we can use (and I forked it and flipped it to be a DreamObjects PHP Class), telling people they have to download the S3.php file and then make this separate PHP file is a little annoying.
```
//include the S3 class
if (!class_exists('S3'))require_once('S3.php');

//AWS access info
if (!defined('awsAccessKey')) define('awsAccessKey', 'MYACCESSKEY');
if (!defined('awsSecretKey')) define('awsSecretKey', 'MYSECRETKEY');

//Bucket Info
$bucketName = 'MYBUCKETNAME';

/* STOP EDITING HERE */

//instantiate the class
$s3 = new S3(awsAccessKey, awsSecretKey);


// Get the contents of our bucket
$bucket_contents = $s3->getBucket($bucketName);

foreach ($bucket_contents as $file){

    $fname = $file['name'];
    $furl = 'http://'.$bucketName.'.objects.dreamhost.com/'.$fname;

    //output a link to the file
    echo '<a href=\'$furl\'>$fname</a><br />';
}
```
I know, it’s not too terribly complicated, but it is annoying to make two files for that, and my DreamObjects listing page is very barebones. You could style it with CSS, make it show the image, make it show in a grid, or even show the file size and have it pop up in a new window.

It does highlight one of my issues with CEPH (AWS whatever) storage, and that it’s still not quite friendly enough. It dumps us back to the old days where we FTP’d our images up to a server and then manually crafted our links. Certainly there are plugins for WordPress that can help us with that, but in general it requires knowing code (or where to get the code) in order to display content.
12 January, 2015
Cloudy With a Chance of Upgrades

We’re all being seduced by the cloud. Amazon’s AWS has become so popular and so, seemingly, inexpensive, that people are looking at it to run a website, instead of traditional hosting. Understanding the cloud actually was the first post on this site, and while two years ago I struggled to comprehend it, today I find myself at a loss many times when asked ‘Do I need the Cloud?’

I don’t need the cloud for webhosting, and you probably don’t either.

Yes, I have a semi-cloudlike host on LiquidWeb right now, for seven of the ten domains I manage (the other three are all on their own hosts, one of which being my me Elf Dreams, where I talk about DreamHost stuff). I don’t plan on moving the other seven simply because it’s a massive effort. It’s easier to move yourself across country than it would be to move all my sites, re-build the server as I need it, get the code for the new OS (CentOS vs whatever I move to). Heck, I’m dreading upgrading to CentOS6 because of how annoying that is.

The point is that I do know and understand what the cloud is and does. It’s very cool, if you’re big enough to need it. Most indie sites are not.

How the cloud works, in general, is based on the shared resources principal. Everyone shares all the resources in the cloud at all times. If you think back to shared hosting, everyone shares all the resources on that server. The difference between the cloud and the shared is that the cloud has infinite expandability (kind of, but you get the idea), where as a shared host is limited to what it is physically. But when we were back on shared hosting, we used to have a problem with bad neighbors. You know, the other guy on your server who got tweeted by Felicia Day or Wil Wheaton, and suddenly all the sites on your server went down like a bad quiche.

That can happen on the cloud too.

It’s not exactly the same, but when you’re on a cloud, you’re on a server with a lot of virtual machines (VM). A VM is a “completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system” which is a confusing concept. The reason they’re good is that a VM isolates your hardware in a funky way, making reboots faster, while letting your VM instances share a bunch of hardware and become faster. The flip side to this is that you’re still on a real server. Instead of everyone sharing the same CPU/RAM, you get partitions so I can only use X amount and you can only use Y, and thus we don’t kill each other, until we start slaughtering input/output.

Disk I/O (input/output) can be best explained if you’re an older computer user. Remember when we used to play “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?” and we’d press a button to ‘travel’ and that old floppy drive would grind like a cheap espresso brewer? That’s I/O. The disk is being read and the data is being input from the disk and output to your Apple IIe. The basic concept of this still exists, and it makes sense when you remember we have to read the data off somewhere. So if you happen to be on a box that is getting a lot of traffic, and using a lot of disk I/O, then you’re going to be slow.

There are ways to mitigate this, of course, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is that you don’t always know that you need to, or how you should. And even if you do know, it’s not always very easy to do it, so the little guy, who doesn’t have the resources to do it themselves, or the money to hire someone, are left hoping that they’re okay, and often end up paying more than they need to.

And this is why you and I don’t need the cloud yet. The cloud is something I might need, but for now, there are no benefits I don’t already have with a well optimized server and a well built site. If I was a bigger site, or a company, I’d be looking at it as my next upgrade, and studying my past growth. It took me almost 10 years to grow to need a VPS, and it will likely take me at least 5 more before I need to seriously consider cloud. By then, something new will be the big thing, so the best thing I can do is study nginx and keep a finger on the pulse of web technology.

Of coures, the one major advantage to the cloud, and the reason I still see it as being around for a while, is the ability to scale up and down. A webhost provider can cannily utilize that to provide scalable shared hosting, so if you have a bad neighbor, they can be scaled up with less impact to you. But so far as I know, we’re only there with VPS demi-cloud providers right now. Give it time, and the cloud as we know it today will be tomorrow’s low-end hosting.

11 October, 2012
Smart Servers

I upgraded the server that runs this site. Well, I should say I transferred from a traditional VPS on CentOS 4 32 bit server I’ve been on since 2009 to a CentOS 5, 64 bit, fully managed Smart Server.

What’s a Smart Server?

You know this whole cloud hosting thing? It’s like that, but not. I had serious concerns about the cloud. Certainly I was worried when I heard people running WordPress MultiSite had weird issues with caching and things not syncing up when new server slices were made. Reason enough to hold off for me. But then my host says “We have these in-between servers.”

LiquidWeb Smart Servers are kind of like Cloud Servers. First, I’m the only person on my server (which is a step up from VPS), and I have a set amount of bandwidth. I’m charged per-day, too, so if I need more CPU/Memory for a couple days, I only get charged for those days. That’s really nice. There’s a lot of normal ‘cloud’ features too, like I can spin up new images on the fly and use them (maybe 30 minutes total to do all that).

Yeah, 30 minutes. Thinking about how long it took to just migrate from host2 to gamera(Gamera (ガメラ?) is a giant, flying turtle from a popular series of kaiju (Japanese giant monster) films produced by Daiei Motion Picture Company in Japan. Created in 1965 to rival the success of Toho Studios’ Godzilla during the daikaiju boom of the mid-to-late 1960s, Gamera has gained fame and notoriety as a Japanese icon in his own right.), being able to move things around on the fly with only an hour of outage is nothing. When I moved my three WordPress sites, they took about an hour or so each (give or take). When I moved my forum with a 4gig database, it took about eight hours. We made jokes about how it was the size of Liechtenstein.(The problem with a 4gig database is when 400megs is in one table. Takes a long time, no matter what you do. The file copied over fast, but the exploding of it took long enough for me to nap.)

None of that was why I upgraded/moved though. The real reason for the upgrade was that my server’s been having weird issues, and most of my research said it was because I was on CentOS 4. I couldn’t upgrade SVN, I couldn’t upgrade PHP for much longer, and I was sure that come February 2012 (when CentOS 4 is EOLd) I was going to be increasingly in the cold. So I made a list of everything I’d ‘done’ to my server, all the upgrades and tweaks, and I went for broke.

For the most part, I can’t tell the difference between my old VPS and my new smart server other than the speed (much faster). What I did notice, and didn’t like, was that the memory tends to run ‘hot.’ With nothing going on at all, it was hitting 90% usage. With nothing going on for my old site, it’s at 50% (and normally hovered around 60-70%). Gamera definitely runs heavier, though I’m still using the old caching. I did have to up PHP memory to 64megs, from 32, after I ran into weird issues on one site, but for the most part, I’m in a ‘It Just Works’ state of mine. Oh and I will very much need to sort out external SSL, since everything’s on one IP now, and you can’t use multiple SSL like that.

Yet I’ve still not answered the question. What is a Smart Server anyway? Thankfully LiquidWeb isn’t the only site using this designation.

We know what Cloud Server is, and we know why it’s good. It’s flexible, it can add on memory and diskspace as I need it, and take it away if (when) I don’t. I’m charged for what I’m using, not a blanket ‘This is what I need on my worst day’ sort of deal. But the problem there is a lot of people actually need that flexibility but don’t have the brainpower to handle running their own server. Two years ago, I didn’t, that’s for sure. In fact, two years ago, Cloud scared me. But, just like VPS.net came up with Cloud Shared Hosting (which I jokingly called Cloud for Dummies), LiquidWeb and some other said that some of us really need a VPS, but we’d like some of those cloud features too.

This is the middle ground. Too many places were looking at Cloud Dedicated hosting, which is expensive, and not something we all need, and then was also that race to the cheap hosting. I pay $60 a month for my hosting, and it’s worth it. I know, it’s a lot of money to some people, but think on this: If I pick up the phone right now and call Tom, my sales guy, or Benny, the tech I know pretty well, they’ll take the time to help me. And if I call the 1-800 number at 1am? Someone is there who speaks English and knows what I’m talking about.(Not that I don’t love OffShore support, I know I love the ones at my office! Many of them are fantastic in their fields and well worth the price of admission. But too many companies force these intelligent people to stick to a script, and don’t teach them the hows and whys of the code, the company, and how to work with American customers. If you’re going to support Americans, you must learn how to deal with them, for better or for worse, you learn to deal with your customers. And yes, that means being fluent in their native language, and their technologies. This holds true for India, Mexico and that moron from Nebraska who wanted me to go into the registry on my Macintosh. AT&T.) So while I’m willing to pay more for someone who will bail me out, I’m not willing to pay more for something I don’t use. Like extra minutes on my cell phone, I don’t like to pay for hypothetical ‘in case I get the Digg effect or Matt links to me again’ CPU and memory.

While a Cloud Server would handle all that, it also requires consistent and constant management. You have to know what to expect, and be ready to go. Those of us who do all this as hobbies or as a side-gig don’t have the time. Also, sharing resources in the cloud makes some of us sketchy. The whole reason we self-host anyway is that we want to be in control. Cloud sharing started to sound a lot like Shared Hosting, which has issues of it’s own. Resource contention is s concern, as are bad neighbors. The cloud is great for hosts because it shares everything, and complicated for users because we don’t want to share.

It sounds a little repetitive to call this Cloud Light. In fact, it feels really repetitive to say “This is like a VPS, but with Cloud Add-ons.” Part of this is because understanding what the Cloud is, after decades of the old way, is hard for our brains to wrap around. For most of us, the cloud doesn’t matter. In fact, it barely matters for me. The cloud is really what the internet has always been to most of us: ephemeral and mystical. Don’t let the smoke out of the cloud, or your website will crash! See? You don’t know anything more than you did before, now do you?

The Cloud is synonymous with the Internet for many people, and I think the future of it is aimed that way. For me, having the ability not to be tied to hardware and to add on more space, memory and CPU as I need it is invaluable. Being priced reasonably for those things also makes me pleased. The Cloud gave me freedom, but a Smart Server gives me even more: the freedom to control my destiny on my server. And that’s just cool.

So what’s the downside? There are some.

Understanding memory usage has been the big issue. I mentioned before that Gamera uses 90% of the memory, normally, and after my database crash I came to understand why. See not being tied to hardware means I’m not tied to hardware memory either. So linux, being linux, uses up all the memory it can. I watched, and when I start doing more intensive stuff, like importing a 4G database, the memory dropped to about 75%, and then bounced back up to 80-90. This is what it’s supposed to do! When it starts running out of memory, it goes to swap. Now on the traditional VPS, this was bad. Swap meant you were ‘out’ of memory and about to crash. On a Smart VPS, this is okay. My swap sits around 10% right now until I clean it out.

Cleaning it out is where things get weird. Smart VPS memory doesn’t clean out. If I hot-swapped my memory, some genius at MIT sorted out I could actually read data off the memory. Of course, if you have the physical access to my server I have other problems. But swapping memory, well that means the computer swaps data to the hard disk and back to your RAM as needed. I’m not entirely sure how this all works, and I’m doing some research now (and asking the tech from last night for info he said he had about all this). As for the crash… My database crashed on Saturday because the table was 600mb, and the space I’d allocated for swapping like that was 400mb. Liquidweb’s support moved the SQL temp drive to a place with more space to allow for that and everything started working again.

SSL was pretty straightforward. I bought an extra IP, since it’s cheaper and easier than sorting out multiple domains on 1-IP for SSL for only two domains. The other domains don’t need SSL yet, so they can wait until WHM catches up with SNI and other weird acronyms you don’t care about.

Basically, I’m very happy. I’ve even started to forget it’s something novel.

24 October, 2011

Tag: cloud

Alternate Symbols

The Code

Usage Example

Remotely Hosting SVGs

To The Cloud

Upload Your Files

Calling An Individual File

Getting a List Of All SVGs

SDK V2

SDK V3

Side Note…

Which is Better?

Listing Everything on DreamObjects

Cloudy With a Chance of Upgrades

Smart Servers