Re: [otrs] OTRS on an Amazon EC2 Micro Instance

On 12/19/2011 09:12 AM, Robinson Mitchell wrote:

Everything is in the cloud but I also do database dumps to local storage periodically. If you have the database you can rebuild the OTRS instance very quickly from source (no compiling - just load up a LAMP stack, Perl and support binaries, extract the app, apply file system permissions then enter the database credentials and you're pretty much set. This allows creation of a local VM for testing and experimentation.

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Steve Clark mailto:sclark@netwolves.com> wrote:

On 12/19/2011 08:59 AM, Robinson Mitchell wrote:

...

Hi Steve: We're a small boutique IT shop serving small businesses, so we usually have fewer than 25 tickets per day, and only have three techs, so the transactional load on the server is very low. The nice thing about using EC2 is that if we need to move up to a small instance, I can simply stop the server, make a snapshot, the launch the snapshot as a new instance and choose to make it a small or large instead of a micro. Instant scalability if it's needed.

Do you keep local backup copies or is everything in the cloud?

...

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 5:51 AM, Steve Clark mailto:sclark@netwolves.com> wrote:

On 12/18/2011 08:52 PM, Robinson Mitchell wrote:

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Greetings:

This isn't a how-to technical question. I'm just interested in how others are using OTRS.

We are a small IT company and until recently we were running OTRS 2.47 with ITSM on an Amazon EC2 Small instance. We replaced a commercial helpdesk system which used the JBOSS stack on a Windows box about a year and a half ago with OTRS 2.47. The old helpdesk was ugly, buggy and barely ran. OTRS did everything we wanted and reduced our costs because a Linux instance was less expensive. We were very happy and have never thought about turning back.

Recently Amazon had a hiccup with their EBS storage and I took advantage of that hiccup to go ahead and upgrade OTRS. Provisioned an Ubuntu VM on an internal server, installed OTRS 2.47 with ITSM and uploaded our database to it, then upgraded to OTRS 3.0.11 using source.

I provisioned one of the new low-cost EC2 Micro instances using a Canonical Ubuntu 10.04LTS image, then installed 3.0.11 from source, then uploaded the upgraded database from our internal server and pointed the OTRS installation to the new database.. The Micro instance gives us a dedicated OTRS server in the Amazon cloud, and the cost with EBS storage and an Elastic IP address is less than $18 per month running 24/7. The micro instance performs well - no latency or lagginess issues at all in our experience ( the old Windows helpdesk would not even be able to run on a Micro instance).

One thing that has gotten easier is the mail configuration - We use Google Apps as our email engine, and 3.0.11 was a snap to set up using Google Apps. Once I got database backups scripted then scheduled weekly system snapshots we were set.

The new interface is very slick and also seems to display better in mobile devices - I can use my Android phone to work tickets on the native OTRS interface, but I am hoping to see a customized interface for Android like the one that's already working on iPhone.

That's a snapshot of our experience - I'm interested to see if anyone else is hosting OTRS in the Amazon cloud and to hear of what other platforms people are using. If anyone needs help getting OTRS running in the Amazon cloud we'll be glad to answer questions as well.

I've worked with dozens of ticketing systems in over 20 years of IT work, and nothing else even comes close to OTRS in terms of bang for buck. Kudos to the dev team and the community!

Rob

Hi Rob,

Very interesting. How many tickets do you have a day?

Thanks,

Yes it is pretty simple to setup. We are currently running in house with a daily backup to another machine which automatically loads the backup. This way we have at the least a backup that is only a day old. I want to move to postgresql 9.1.x from postgresql 8.4.4 so we can do streaming replication. I am very intrigued with doing in the cloud to mitigate DR issues, since we are in Florida and could possibly be hit by a hurricane. -- Stephen Clark *NetWolves* Sr. Software Engineer III Phone: 813-579-3200 Fax: 813-882-0209 Email: steve.clark@netwolves.com http://www.netwolves.com