When most people think about Drupal in "The Cloud" they think of running virtual servers that share storage using a network file system. These servers are otherwise provisioned and deployed in a traditional one-at-a-time approach. This is how Drupal was designed to operate.

For our applications (and developers!) to fully realize the benefit of using cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, we need to build cloud native applications. Cloud native means reducing the use of long running servers and relying on purpose built services and elastic compute capacity. With respect to Drupal, it means figuring out how to handle decentralized storage, auto-provisioning, auto-scaling, and multi-region fault tolerance.

In our session, we will walk you through Major League Soccer's approach to deploying a high-traffic media site in Drupal 7 as an AWS native application. We will discuss specific solutions to the challenges faced including:

- Using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and making it play nice with other modules
- Cloud friendly CSS and Javascript aggregation using Grunt
- Auto-provisioning and auto-scaling new web instances on EC2
- Decentralized code deployment to running and anonymous servers
- Handling MySQL replication and cache invalidation for active Drupal instances in multiple Amazon regions

This talk is intended for developers who care deeply about managing the operations of their Drupal systems and are interested in alternatives to current Drupal PAAS offerings.