Devops and Drupal focuses on the current state of devops practices among Drupal developers and system administrators. A survey of over 200 Drupal professionals found that while many are aware of devops concepts like continuous integration and deployment, few have fully implemented best practices for areas like automated testing, configuration management, and disaster recovery. Adopting a devops approach can help Drupal teams improve collaboration, deploy more frequently, and better manage systems over time.

1. Devops
and Drupal
Current State
Kris Buytaert, march 2012

2. Kris Buytaert
• I used to be a Dev,
• Then Became an Op
• Chief Trolling Officer and Open Source
Consultant @inuits.eu
• Everything is an effing DNS Problem
• Building Clouds since before the bookstore
• Some books, some papers, some blogs
• But mostly, trying to be good at my job

3. Devop, definition
● 30 something
● Senior Infrastructure guy
● Development background
● Open Source Expcerience
● Mostly European (.be / .uk)
● Likes Belgian Beer
● Likes Sushi

4. What's this Devops thing really about ?

5. World , 200X-2009
Patrick Debois, Gildas Le Nadan, Andrew Clay Shafer, Kris Buytaert, Jezz
Humble, Lindsay Holmwood, John Willis, Chris Read, Julian Simpson, and
lots of others ..
Gent , October 2009
Mountain View , June 2010
Hamburg , October 2010
Boston, March 2011
Mountain View, June 2011
Bangalore, Melbourne,
Goteborg , October 2011

6. ● Devops is a growing movement
● We don't have all the answers yet
● We are reaching out to different communities
● We will point out problems we see..
● Only the name is new
While we are still working out the solutions

7. What's the problem ?
The community of developers whose work you
see on the Web, who probably don’t know what
ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better
systems at less cost in less time at lower risk
than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even
when you factor in the greater flexibility and
velocity of startups.
Tim Bray , on his blog January 2010

8. The real problem :
● Friday evening at 16:59
“Put this Code Live, here's a tarball”
NOW!
● Backups ?
● What database ?
● Security ?
● High Availability ?
● Scalability ?
● Who is on Call ?

9. “devops is a cultural and
professional movement”
Adam Jacob

10. CAMS
● Culture
● Automation
● Measurement
● Sharing
Damon Edwards and John Willis

11. Why a survey ?
• Gut feeling vs Reality
• The sad state of our customers practices
• Java folks GET the Problem !
• Twittersphere says it doesn't matter for PHP
• Lies , Damn Lies and Statistics

12. Audience
● 200+
● Schizophrenic
● Experienced (6y
average)
● Webdeveloping
● System
Administrators

13. Organisation Type
● In small to midsized
companies
● Good internal
Communication
● Vs Large Enterprises
with Silos ..

14. What's devops to them ?
• A buzzword
• Developers who also do IT operations, or visa versa.
• The people in charge of the build/release cycle and planning.
• system administrators with a development culture.
• Someone who mixes both a sysop and dev duties
• the combination of developer and operations into one overall
functionality

15. What's devops to them ?
#
NG
• A buzzword
• Developers who also do IT operations, or visa versa.
•
•
RO
The people in charge of the build/release cycle and planning.
system administrators with a development culture.
• Someone who mixes both a sysop and dev duties
W
• the combination of developer and operations into one overall
functionality

16. What's devops to them ?
• Breaking the wall between dev and ops in the same way agile
breaks the wall between business and dev e.g. coming to terms
with changing requirements, iterative cycles
• Sysadmin best-practise, using configuration as code, and
facilitating communication between sysadmins and developers,
with each understanding and participating in the activities of the
other.
• Devops is both the process of developers and system operators
working closer together, as well as people who know (or who
have worked in) both development and system operations.
• Removing barriers to communication and efficiency through
shared vocabulary, ideals, and business objectives to to deliver
value.
• A set of principles and good practices to improve the interactions
between Operations and Development.

17. Practice devops ?
● Lack of Clear
Definition
● 33% does
● 24% wants
● 22% is in trouble

18. Know Continuous
Delivery ?

19. Nirvana
An “ecosystem” that supports continuous delivery, from
infrastructure, data and configuration management to
business.
Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing
process, and improved collaboration between developers,
testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes
released in a matter of hours — sometimes even minutes–no
matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code
base.
Continuous Delivery , Jez Humble

20. Site up to date ?
● 70% reads Drupal
Security News .
● Sysadmins Update
● Other = Developers
•Really ?
● Not all components
however :(

21. Critical Bugfixes ?

22. Typical Enviroments
For Devs For Ops
● Scrum ● Kanban
● Version Control ● Version Control
● Automated Build ● Automated Build
● Bugtracking ● Bugtracking
● Continous integration ● Continous integration
● Integrated testing ● Integrated testing
● Automated ● Automated
deployment deployment

23. What about the
Drupalistas ?

24. Version Control

25. Continuous Integration

26. Testing
● No frameworks used
vs
● No exploratory Testing

28. Where do you develop ?
● It works on my
machine :(
● What other platforms
do you use :

29. Looking for ?
“As a system administrator, I can tell when software
vendors hate me. It shows in their products.”
“DON'T make the administrative interface a GUI. System
administrators need a command-line tool for constructing
repeatable processes. Procedures are best documented by
providing commands that we can copy and paste from the
procedure document to the command line. We cannot
achieve the same repeatability when the instructions are:
"Checkmark the 3rd and 5th options, but not the 2nd
option, then click OK." Sysadmins do not want a GUI that
requires 25 clicks for each new user.”
Thomas A. Limoncelli in ACM Queue December 2010
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1921361

30. Deployment
● Database Imports are
EVIL
● Manual Installations
are
● Error Prone How do you deploy ?
● Non
Reproducible
● 61% does it WRONG
Do you Test Deployments ?

31. Deployment Alternatives
● Aegir (security ?)
● Fabric
● Svn git checkouts
(connectivity ?)
How do you deploy ?
● Capistrano
● Custom Tools

32. Deploying a Drupal Site
● Drush make
● Installation Profiles
● Features ,strongarm , Custom code
● Configuration as Code
● What with external apps and libraries?
● Solr – BI software
● Test before you drive! (CI)

33. How do you configure modules ?
● Not reproducable
● Not automated
● 50% can improve :)
● D8 Configuration
Mgmt Efforts !

34. Can you fully reproduce the last site you've
build from code ?

35. Challenges
● What about the data ?
● Content vs Config
● Drupal provides no clear distinction (yet)
● e.g a billing application
● Table Creation
● Provisioning (e.g. Rates, Call plan types)
● Actual Data

36. Content Editing
● Non technical people
● In production
● Plenty of UGC
Who edits content
● Frequent Updated
Sites
● Upgrade troubles
ahead
Where do you edit content ?

37. Upgrading a site
● Drush
● pm-updatecode
● Updatedb
● Features-update
● Once again, test before you drive!
● But ... what about userdata ?

38. Scalability

39. Proxy ?

40. WebServer ?

41. Caching / Scale / Deployment
● MySQL ● NoSQL ● MemCache

42. Disaster Recovery ?

43. 12 days into operations

44. The future
● Don't forget
● Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
● These people CARED to fill in the survey
•D8 Configuration management initiative
•DrupalCon Munich infrastructure/devops track !

45. Conclusions
● Drupal gets is and is supportive
● Conversation happens
● Long Journey ahead
● Heading in the right direction

46. It's not about the tools
It's about change
It's about the people

47. Contact
Kris Buytaert
Kris.Buytaert@inuits.eu
Further Reading
@krisbuytaert
http://krisbuytaert.be/blog/
http://www.inuits.eu/
Inuits
Duboistraat 50
2060 Antwerpen
Belgium
891.514.231
+32 475 961221

48. Deploy Where ?

49. Search