One Drupal to Rule them all !

Hernâni Borges de Freitas

@hernanibf / hernani.pt

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About me!

•  .PT    •  Technical  Team  Lead  PS  •  Drupal*  many  things  •  Travel  lover  •  Twitter.com/hernanibf  •  Hernani.pt  

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One Drupal to rule them all!http://buytaert.net/one-drupal-to-rule-them-all

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One Drupal to rule them all!“My organization wants to standardize in

Drupal and use it to replace all the sites in our network”:

-  They have different look and feel.

-  They can be managed by different people but we saw them as a unique platform.

-  They can share some common sections or content.

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This presentation!

•  Manage a network of Drupal sites with same features / properties.

•  Launch new sites and introduce new features. •  Minimal downtime allowed per site. •  Share data among sites (content/user login) •  Grow their infrastructure in number of nodes /

number of clusters. •  Common software / common infrastructure.

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First challenge!

•  A site for maths department, another for physics, another for literature, another for computer science. All with same look and feel.

•  Sites need to show news from all of those sites. •  Admins should just edit those sites from one

place.

•  One site => One Drupal site? •  Many sites => Many Drupal sites?

What are several sites and what is one site?

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Options!

All sites in one Drupal site •  Same code. •  Same database. •  Contributed modules

will recognize contexts and create sections inside the site.

•  Same infrastructure.

All sites in different Drupal sites •  Same code (with some

differences). •  Different databases. •  Same infrastructure /

Different infrastructure.

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What’s the best?!

Traditional consultant answer:

It depends! -  Sites’ differences. -  Shared properties/

info. -  Predicted evolution. -  Teams responsible

for build/maintain/admin.

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One Drupal site!Better fit for:

§  Content present in several sites. §  Similar look and feel. §  Similar user base / admin workflow. §  Small differences between sites in terms of

functionality,

Mostly used for: §  Webs/Intranets with different sections /

departments. §  Sections with different publishing workflow.

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One Drupal site!

Organic groups § Groups define sections/sites. § Content and users are associated with groups. §  Users have different roles and permissions

within the group. §  Very good integration with views, panels, rules § Good suite of complementary modules

(og_theme, og_menu, og_workbench, og_workflow).

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One Drupal site!

Other options •  Domain access module •  Access control modules

•  Others…

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One Drupal site!

Advantages •  Easier to create a unique experience of one

single site/platform. •  Easier to share content. •  Easier to share users / roles / permissions.

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One Drupal site!

Drawbacks •  Everything gets a bit more complicated. •  Codebase and structures are usually larger

(more views/blocks/content types/panels for the different sections).

•  Single point of failure. •  Harder to decouple in the future.

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Many Drupal sites!

•  Multisites •  Different codebases

In either case they always have •  A common base

– Common Drupal distribution (Features + Install Profile).

– Common infrastructure.

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Many Drupal Sites - Multisites!Advantages •  One codebase to maintain / update. •  Easier to reuse infrastructure. •  Lower memory utilization (APC). •  Simpler at all levels.

Drawbacks!•  Single point of failure. •  Common maintenance windows. •  Harder to maintain differences in code (multiple

versions for same module).

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Many Drupal sites - different codebases!Advantages!•  Can be deployed in different locations. •  No single point of failure in infrastructure. •  Easier to support differences.

Bad!•  Harder to manage pushes of code to all sites. •  Need for a consistent process to manage updates

of code. •  As there can be more differences, harder to test.

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Standards!

“Marketing is demanding us to be able to spin up new sites that are limited in functionality but require minimal development time”.

“Operations is asking us for a standard deployment/maintenance process for all of our sites.

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Meet the idea of factory of sites!

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Meet the idea of factory of sites!

•  Single codebase/distribution with enough modules/features allowing customize sites without touching code.

•  Limited functionality (less is good). •  Easy to spin a new site in few minutes. •  Easy to update sites in the factory without

impacting full network. •  Easy to grow infrastructure by adding cluster

of nodes where different sites are hosted.

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Solutions working in this space!

•  Drupal Gardens •  Acquia Cloud Site Factory •  Pantheon One •  Aegir •  Custom solutions

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Drupalgardens.com!•  Software as a Service (SaaS). Freely available ! •  One distribution (gardens) provides a rich editing

experience (D7). –  Rich field types (Link, Date, Field Collection), Wysiwyg,

Media, Theme editor, WebForms –  Create content through the Drupal Gardens iPhone

app. •  Multisite installation. •  Hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS), easy to

grow and allocate more machines to the cluster.

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Drupalgardens.com!

•  SSO using OpenId. Accounts controlled in the gardener site.

•  Not possible to add any code. •  No vendor lock-in. Possible to export code/

db/files. •  Pricing depending on features enabled and

bandwith consumed.

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Acquia Cloud Site Factory!•  Several distributions are available (gardens,

commons, commerce). New ones can be created.

•  Control Panel (Gardener) controls all sites in the network.

•  Code is controlled from a GIT repository. •  Two environments are created (production/

sandboxes). •  Sites are created directly in production. Sites

can be cloned in sandbox for testing.

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Acquia Site Factory!•  SaaS

– Support and SLA on the software. Several distributions available

•  SaaS+ – Support and SLA on the software. Client can add

code audited by us.

•  PaaS – Support on the platform. Client can add any code

to the platform.

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Acquia Site Factory!

•  Powering the largest network of Drupal websites in the world.

•  Scalable. •  Support included. •  Best of Gardens + Acquia Cloud.

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Demo

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Aegir!

•  Community project to control Drupal hosting.

•  Open source, Self Hosted. •  Hostmaster controls the websites in the

network. •  Aegir is responsible for controlling code

deployment, database creation, vhost change.

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Aegir!

•  Platforms have a code base and will host several sites.

•  Platforms are associated with a a docroot (can be defined using drush make files).

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Aegir platforms!

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Aegir - Sites!

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Aegir - Migrations!

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Aegir !Good!•  Simple networks / simple sites. •  It can be self hosted.

Drawbacks!•  Using a Drupal to manage infrastructure might be tricky. •  Install and configure Aegir is not straightforward. •  Deploy code to several servers is challenging. •  Update sites involves migrating them from platform to

platform. •  Migrating sites involves copy all the database, files and

code and swap the vhost (Hard to scale for larger sites). •  Harder to support the concept of several environments.

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Custom solutions!

Production

Staging

Users/Visitors

Shared Storage

Platform Admin

Load Balancer

Management Server

Web2Web1

Apache/PHPMemcache

MySql Active/Passive

Half size

Deploy process

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Custom solutions!

•  Management server – Access to all hosts in the infrastructure via

SSH. – Database of sites. –  Issuing commands in all sites

•  Drush •  Drush site alias

–  Move databases/files directories between environments (drush sql-sync, drush rsync).

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Custom solutions!•  Everything should be created automatically:

– Databases, disk directories and virtual hosts: – Config management (CM) tools / custom scripts. – Drush site-install can install new (multi)sites.

•  Deploy code to the servers – Capistrano – Drush deploy – Custom scripts

•  Graphic interface to view all the sites and their properties (custom development) and manage jobs (Jenkins?).

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Custom solutions!

•  Infrastructure – Easily launch new nodes to the infrastructure to

support production and pre-production environments and configure them automatically (CM Tools).

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We are hiring! •  Consultants •  Support •  Sales •  Engineering

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Questions?

@hernanibf  /  hernani.pt