Packer VS Apache

The missing piece of puzzle is the AMI "golden image" that will be used to start the instances in autoscaling group. The AMI has to have NGINX and PHP installed with the list of required modules enabled. The great tool to brew one is hashicorp packer.

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

Server templating: Using Packer has never been easier to create reusable server configurations in a platform-independent and documented manner.

I'll give you hard, but rewarding and easy to modify(once you know what you're doing) way. Packer may be a thing you're looking for.

It is straightforward to build them with packer (I have built AMIs for 13.0 and 13.1, but 13.2 should be exactly the same). I've been meaning to write a blog post about it for a while, but have not gotten to it yet... In any case, what I am doing is using the EBS Surrogate Builder to start an instance running the official FreeBSD 13.2 image with an extra volume attached and run a script to create a zpool on the extra volume and bootstrap and configure FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE on it. After that packer takes care of creating an AMI out of that extra volume, so you can use it... If you have any issues, let me know, and maybe I will finally get to writing that blog post...

HashiCorp Packer is a tool for creating machine images for a variety of platforms, including AWS, Azure, and VMware. It allows you to define machine images as code and supports a wide range of configuration options.

Packer is a tool that can be used to build machine images. Basically, it takes a base image, runs a series of steps to provision that image, and then burns a new image. In my workplace we use it heavily to build AWS AMIs. But it has an ARM plugin that looks to be very very suitable for building customised Raspberry Pi images (my quick read of the doco there says it can go ahead and write the final image to an SD card for you too).

Seems related to https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/issues/12118 But the workaround discribed in the comments doesn’t seems to work anymore

I'd suggest using a tool like Packer to build a gold image based on your base AMI and all your changes. Then you'll have your own AMI you can launch new instances with.

Single-page applications (SPAs) existed before S3, but given that you still had to set up, scale, and maintain servers using something like Apache or NGINX in order to serve them, the advantages for “Ops” or “DevOps” were not so different to running a “real server” with a language like PHP, python, or Java.

Apache(prefork mode) + mod_php.

Simiplicity is nice, but there are reasons why Perl and PHP were the popular choices for web stacks in the early 2000's--they are faster and easier to develop with than C and likely safer than C too.

mod_perl (https://perl.apache.org/) and mod_php (https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?c...) helped to make Apache httpd (https://httpd.apache.org/) the number one web server in the early days of the web.

https://httpd.apache.org/ - Apache2 website

The Apache HTTP Server project was initially launched in 1995 by a group of web developers and administrators who sought to improve upon the existing web server software available at the time. The project has since evolved into a collaborative effort, with contributors from around the world working together to maintain and enhance the server. Today, the Apache HTTP Server is managed by the Apache Software Foundation, a non-profit organization that oversees the development of numerous open source software projects.

Apache websites of friends and acquaintances

Apache: This is the web server that is used in the LAMP stack. Apache is an open-source web server that provides a flexible and scalable platform for hosting web applications.

Install the web server software: Download the appropriate version of Apache HTTP Server for your operating system from the official website (https://httpd.apache.org/). Follow the installation instructions provided in the documentation.

Popular web servers include Apache and Nginx. Apache is the most widely used web server on the internet, and it is known for its flexibility and extensibility. Nginx, on the other hand, is known for its speed and efficiency, and it is often used as a reverse proxy or load balancer.