How can I clone DigitalOcean Droplets to ensure they stay identical and in sync for use in a load balancer?

Hey Sharif,

Great to hear that you’re planning to scale your environment with multiple Droplets! Here’s a breakdown of how you can approach this setup, along with an ASCII diagram to give you a visual overview.

Cloning Droplets

To keep your Droplets identical, you can start by taking a snapshot of your initial Droplet. This snapshot serves as a template, allowing you to create additional Droplets that are exact replicas of the original one. This ensures consistency in your application’s environment across all Droplets.

Synchronization & Code Deployment

When it comes to deploying code updates, one of the simplest and most effective methods is using Git. By pushing your code to a GitHub repository, you can then pull the latest changes on each Droplet. This way, all your Droplets stay in sync with the same codebase without any direct modifications being made on the Droplets themselves.

Here’s what the process looks like:

1. Develop locally: Make your changes and commit them to your GitHub repository.
2. Deploy to Droplets: SSH into each Droplet and run a git pull command to fetch the latest code from your GitHub repository.
3. GitHub actions: You can automate this process further by using GitHub Actions to deploy your code to the Droplets whenever a new commit is pushed to the repository.

This ensures that your deployment process is consistent and easy to manage.

Database Management

For the database, it’s best to set up a Managed Database Cluster. This allows your Droplets to remain stateless, connecting to a central database, which simplifies scaling and ensures data consistency without the need for manual replication or maintaining multiple databases.

Caching and Sessions

If you’re handling sessions or caching, a Redis cluster is a great option for in-memory storage. Alternatively, if you’re not ready to implement Redis, you can store sessions directly in your managed database.

Static Files

For static assets like images and files, using DigitalOcean Spaces is ideal. Spaces allows your Droplets to share these assets seamlessly, avoiding the need to replicate files across multiple servers.

Impact of Cloudflare

Using Cloudflare alongside your Load Balancer adds an extra layer of caching and security. Cloudflare will enhance performance and protect your setup without disrupting your Load Balancer’s functionality. Just ensure that your Load Balancer’s health checks are configured properly and that Cloudflare is set to pass traffic to your Load Balancer.

Basically by separating your application’s concerns—using a dedicated or managed database, offloading static files to Spaces, and optionally integrating a Redis cluster—you’ll create a scalable and resilient environment. Deploying code via Git ensures that your setup remains consistent across all Droplets without any manual changes.

Here is a quick ASCII diagram to illustrate the setup:

                        +---------------------+
                        |     Cloudflare      |
                        +---------------------+
                                  |
                                  |
                        +---------------------+
                        |   DigitalOcean      |
                        |  Load Balancer      |
                        +---------------------+
                           /       |        \
                          /        |         \         Pull changes from GitHub
                         /         |          \        on each server or use Docker
           +----------------+ +----------------+ +----------------+
           | Droplet 1      | | Droplet 2      | | Droplet 3      |
    -------| (Web Server)   | | (Web Server)   | | (Web Server)   |
    |      +----------------+ +----------------+ +----------------+
    |              |                  |                  |
    |              |                  |                  |
    |      +-------------------------------------------------------+
    |      |                 Managed Database Cluster              |
    |      +-------------------------------------------------------+
    |                          |
    |                          |
    |                  +----------------+
    |----------------->|   Redis Cache   |
    |                  +----------------+
    |                          |
    |                          |
    |                   +----------------+
    |                   |    Spaces      |
    |------------------>| (Static Files) |
                        +----------------+

This will be similar to the setup described in this blog post here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/customers/content-ignite

On a separate note, if you don’t want to manage all this, it might be a good idea to look into the App Platform which takes away most of the complexity from this setup for you, like the automated deployments, scaling and etc.

Let me know if you have any questions!

- Bobby

Heya,

In order to clone your Droplet you can use the Snapshot feature.

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/snapshots/

Snapshots are on-demand disk images of DigitalOcean Droplets and volumes saved to your account. Use them to create new Droplets and volumes with the same contents.