Lifting the Lid on our Containers
We have been running containers in production for more than a year now and want to share some of the lessons learnt, by open sourcing our container suite.
We have been running containers in production for more than a year now and want to share some of the lessons learnt, by open sourcing our container suite.
Over the years we’ve embraced the idea of DevOps within our organisation. That is, bringing the developers closer to operations, and visa versa, to be more collaborative, embrace our agile processes, and become more efficient. When we designed Skipper, our Kubernetes-based container hosting platform, this was the focus of our attention.
The PreviousNext team are gearing up for our annual pilgrimage to DrupalGov Canberra, being held on Monday March 27 at the QT Hotel. With more than 200 tickets already sold, the conference is set to be one of the largest Drupal events in the Southern Hemisphere and a testament to how significant Drupal is now within the Australian Government.
In Drupal 7 we used Node Hierarchy module to keep track of a hierarchy of pages. Node hierarchy ties directly to the menu system. When getting a list of all ancestors or descendents, it is a O(n) operation, and at least one site we use it on has a lot of nodes in the tree. Performance was terrible. Add to that it has no notion of revisions or forward revisions, so changing the parent and saving a draft can cause all sorts of issues with your menu. When the time came to update the site to Drupal 8, we took a different approach.
At Drupal South 2016, I attempted to summarize some of my pain points with Drupal core.
The session 'At 16 years of age, does Drupal have an identity problem' is the result of this.
You can watch the recording, or download the slides below.
A recent Drupal 8 project of ours had some great requirements around it’s landing pages, aimed at reusing existing components in a range of layouts and combinations. Paragraphs quickly established itself as the site-building tool of choice and Flexbox always wins for me as the CSS grid/layout approach, so we looked at how the two could be combined to give the client the flexibility they needed, without over-complicating the editor experience.
PreviousNext has worked closely with a large government agency on their public portal for the last few years. As one of the most visited Drupal sites in Australia with more than 7 million page views per month, the agency was seeking higher performance and cost efficiency from their Drupal hosting provider.
I recently attended DrupalCon Dublin where I spoke about being a less controlling project manager. Having experienced a shift some years ago to a more agile way of working, it’s a topic I was keen to explore.
In my talk I outlined how implementing a model of centralised control on a project is not a healthy approach. I discussed how it may be one of the main contributing factors that can lead to projects becoming quite challenged, or even failing altogether.
The Drupal open source project only exists because of code contributions by tens of thousands of developers and Drupal focused companies around the world. In his recent post, project founder Dries Buytaert blogged that “The Drupal community has a shared responsibility to build Drupal and that those who get more from Drupal should consider giving more”.
Australia’s contribution to Drupal code is significantly underrepresented, with PreviousNext the only Australian company in the Top 100 contributors listed on Drupal.org’s global marketplace. DrupalSouth represents the best opportunity for a wider pool of Australian Drupal developers to change this status by participating in DrupalSouth's official Code Sprint, being held on Wednesday, 26th October.
On a recent project a feature was requested to allow admins to launch some content within a modal window from the WYSWIYG on a Drupal 8 website. The goals were as follows:
This is how we accomplished it.