Drupal Site Hosting and Management: Acquia Case Studies from the Frontlines

Drupal Site Hosting and Management: Acquia Customer Stories Bryan House Jim Salem Sr. Director, Marketing VP, Platform Services Acquia Acquia @bryanhouse @jcsalem

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Agenda   Overview Acquia Hosting   Customer case studies –  Performance –  Scalability –  Flexibility –  Support   Summary   Q&A

Drupal Optimized Cloud-based Hosting

Scalable, High Performance Infrastructure balancer balancer file   Hosted on AWS, SAS 70 page caching page caching server certified platform   Highly available HA file server   Caching & load balancing web web via Varnish, Nginx node web node node   Opcode caching file server   Fault-tolerant HA file system synchronous db failover   Nightly offsite backups   4 hour snapshots active passive db db

How is Acquia Hosting Unique?   Highly-available, elastic architecture   Optimized for Drupal scalability & performance   One-stop shop - “No ﬁnger-pointing”   World class Drupal and systems expertise

Who’s Using Acquia Hosting? Global PR Firm Performance Scalability Flexibility Support

ForeignPolicy.com - Performance

Background: ForeignPolicy.com   Award-winning magazine for global politics, economics and ideas   Foreign Policy’s website goal – extend magazine’s reach   Why Drupal? –  “We needed something that would meet our growing needs… something scalable and ﬂexible”

ForeignPolicy.com Challenges   To start – they hosted their site internally   Struggled with success –  Rapid content growth –  Social features to share content –  Infrastructure limitations impacted site performance

ForeignPolicy.com Challenges   We “weren’t prepared for how quickly the site would grow thanks to the new content and easier ways of sharing it”   “Things were rough for a while. There just wasn’t the hardware and infrastructure … to ramp up growth so quickly”

Intelligent Page Caching

ForeignPolicy.com and Acquia   “Acquia is the one-stop solution for us”   Beneﬁts –  Better site performance & scaling   “We don’t have to worry about the site crashing in case one of our articles attracts attention” –  24x7 Support   “If something does go wrong, Acquia responds quickly and doesn’t stop until they ﬁnd the source of the problem.” –  Technical access to site   “It was key for us that Acquia provide the support… but that we still have full access to work with our environment.”

Global PR Firm - Scalability Global PR Firm

A Global PR Firm   Major business news announcement –  Expected 20 million unique visitors the ﬁrst day –  Major business implication should the site fail   Why Drupal? –  Drupal enabled them to quickly make site changes during the day of the announcement   Critical success factor –  Budgeted time for load testing from the start

What is Load Testing?   An industry best practice to insure performance   Load testing cloud services –  Soasta CloudTest –  BrowsterMob   DIY load testing –  Jmeter –  Siege –  The Grinder –  Goofy (an Acquia-developed open source tool)

Problems at their previous ISP   Originally, Global PR Firm chose a traditional, well-known hosting provider   Problems –  No Drupal expertise –  Hosting firm couldn’t provide a cost-effective hosting environment that scaled to PR firm’s needs   Failed PR Firm’s load testing   So… –  One week before launch they called Acquia

Scalable, Elastic Architecture

Global PR Firm Results   Rigorous load testing prior to the big day –  Tested Acquia Hosting using Soasta CloudTest   5,000 requests/second!   320 mbits/sec traffic   830 page views/sec –  Found hardware configuration best suited to needs   Successful site launch, no hiccups –  “best web launch … ever”   After the storm… –  Acquia scaled down hardware configuration to meet steady-state traffic conditions, saving them $$$

MotherJones.com - Flexibility

Mother Jones   Non-proﬁt news organization that specializes in investigative, political & social justice reporting –  Launched web site in 1993   Why Drupal? –  Flexibility of Drupal platform –  Ability to add new functionality quickly - modular architecture

Previous Hosting Challenges   Mother Jones faced a series of challenges with their ﬁrst hosting provider –  Uptime –  Performance –  Spambots –  Log access

Proactive Monitoring, High Availability

Mother Jones and Acquia   Why Acquia? –  One stop shop for entire Drupal infrastructure –  Hosting, support, and remote administration   Improved site performance –  Drupal site optimization –  More aggressive page caching   Faster support issue resolution –  Reduced site downtime

Mother Jones and Acquia   “Our initial team simply weren’t experienced at preparing an iron-clad architecture that could withstand traffic intensive demands. Acquia is clearly experienced, and has specific strategies, testing procedures, and monitoring tools to ensure we can handle traffic loads today, tomorrow, and next year.”   “Acquia has demonstrated superior expertise in a very simple way – they excel at discovering and solving problems immediately.” Robert Wise, System Administrator, MotherJones.com

New York State Senate - Support

New York State Senate   Previous sites –  Static, brochure-ware –  No standardization across senators, sites all diﬀerent –  Little discourse, less value to citizens   Ground-breaking Gov 2.0 web strategy –  “We are regarded as having one of the best legislative sites in the country.” –  Creative Commons to keep all information open and free   Why Drupal? –  Repeatable framework for senator microsite deployment –  Content sharing & reuse across sites –  Robust permissions and access controls

New York State Senate and Acquia   Primary drivers for Acquia selection –  Reliability of hosting infrastructure –  Availability of enterprise-class support   Results –  Improved content access, all Senate administrative and legislative data available online –  Increased citizen participation

New York State Senate and Acquia   “Acquia oﬀers a quality of support that I haven’t seen before in the Drupal community. They are responsive and proactive. They aren’t content just to see the site running smoothly-- Acquia is always looking for new modules and features that can help us better realize our vision for our site.” Andrew Hoppin, CIO, NYSenate.gov

Many Reasons to Choose Acquia Hosting Global PR Firm Performance Scalability Flexibility Support

one-stop shop Drupal application + infrastructure support

Beneﬁts of Acquia Hosting   Highly-available, elastic architecture   Optimized for Drupal scalability & performance   One-stop shop - “No ﬁnger-pointing”   World class Drupal and systems expertise

  Do you love working with Drupal?   If so, Acquia is hiring: – Engineering & design – Operations – Client advisors and consulting – Inside sales Check out openings at http://acquia.com/careers

Questions   For more information, visit: –  http://acquia.com –  http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-hosting –  http://twitter.com/acquia –  http://twitter.com/drupalgardens –  http://facebook.com/acquia   Contact us: Recording of today’s event and slides –  sales@acquia.com will be posted at: http://acquia.com/community/resources/ –  888.9.ACQUIA recorded_webinars   Try Drupal 7 for free –  Sign up for beta code at http://drupalgardens.com   Sign up for a free 30-day Acquia Network Trial –  http://acquia.com/trial

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Drupal Site Hosting and Management: Acquia Case Studies from the Frontlines

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Drupal Site Hosting and Management: Acquia Case Studies from the Frontlines — Presentation Transcript