Speaker: Manuel Gomes
Level: Intermediate
Key takeaways:
- Elements of managing Drupal environments
- Considerations of Drupal as a platform citizen
- Drupal as an application framework - dos and don’ts
- Platform semantics patterns and anti-patterns
- Known-good tooling for large Drupal installations / clusters
Abstract
When the number of Drupal environments you are running goes from a baker's dozen to a few thousand, you have to start thinking differently.
The key realization is that you are no longer operating a bunch of Drupal instances, no longer creating and managing a server or a database (well, you are, but…): you are operating a platform, tending an ecosystem.
You need to think holistically and build a vocabulary and grammar to describe the platform - tell a story. (The muse dreams, the client signs up, the site is born). All the details, all the magic, have to happen under the hood: automatically, unobtrusively - but be inspectable, deterministic, reproducible.
On the way to making this dream take wing, we’ll visit:
Zen and the Art of Environment Management
Building a Drupal Platform… with Drupal. And Far Too Much Ansible.
Backing It Up: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Object Stores
The goodness of restic, the badness of Drupal caching, the ugliness that turned to beauty. With far too much Ansible.
Taming the Firehose: Mischievously Managing Your Logs
Q: Who in their right mind would run a system named after the god of mischief in production?!
A: This guy! Loki, Grafana, and Promtail, a match made in Asgard. Sorta. And far too much Ansible.
Keeping It All Together: Machining Your State
It’s all about Events, Commands, and state machines. And far too much Ansible.
The Way Forward: Tackling the “Many Thousands” Scale Point
But is it a point? Or a blurry line? A stain? If you build it, will they come?
And will they bring their own Kubernetes Cluster? How do you bootstrap a platform in a virtually unknown environment?
And how can you build “enterprise” features and still do some good for the community, for open source in general, for the health of the internet?