cooking up the offense like he's cooking ravioli

In future posts I plan on describing specific pieces of the swap-bot that contribute to a solid setup. Before I get to the specifics, I am going to give a high level overview of the network setup and software packages used to achieve my goals.

Swap-bot.com is a community site that enables users to trade handmade crafts through the postal mail. I started the site with Rachel a few years ago. After four years of reliable service, we have outgrown most single-host solutions.

At its core, Swap-bot is a PHP/MySQL application – it’s really just a basic LAMP application.

A few months ago I started to realize that one server wasn’t enough.  I wanted to load balance my webserver and beef up my database server. I also wanted to have freedom to control which packages get installed on my servers.

After some research and setup, Swap-bot now run an nginx load balancer on top of two apache webservers. I also have a mysql server with plenty of memory that I now run memcached, a sphinx search server and my mail server from. In addition to the production servers, I have one administration host that is used as a subversion repository host and a yum/rpmbuild host. I also have a development machine that exactly matches production and another host used for various blogs and small sites.

In future posts I will go into depth on each specific piece with the goal of hopefully helping someone out and better documenting what I have done for my own future reference.