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Our DevOps Approach to Multisite and Drupal 8

A high-level overview

of how we’re using DevOps to

pimp our stack
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Kyle Skrinak, I.T. Manager

Web Development and Systems Administration
https://people.duke.edu/~kds38
(nom de cyber: @screenack)

Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at
Duke University
This presentation:

http://bit.ly/DC19-HES

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Meet the team

  • Two Drupal website designers and developers
  • Two Symfony custom application developers
  • Three sysadmins, including one Drupal lead
  • Host 380 websites, including 108 Drupal websites
  • Highly normalized platform — branding, features, and content
  • Support third-party developed websites
  • Plus a bevy of other web and sysadmin-related support
  • We maintain an excellent support reputation
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Current Infrastructure

  • Duke OIT provided VM’s
  • RHEL7
  • MySQL > MariaDB
  • PHP’s aggressive EoL change
  • Shibboleth SSO
  • Third-party integrations: e.g., Qualtrics forms and Box for storage
  • 108 websites on a clustered server pair
  • A varnish and a pound load balancer.
  • A staging and production server per website
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Our Drupal 7 workflow

  • Ansible pulls Drupal core updates from d.o.
  • Three git repos for code
    • Global
      1. Our sites/all (contrib modules, themes, and libraries) repo
      2. Trinity-level theme (Omega-based) repo at sites/all/themes
    • per website
      1. Website repo (theme, modules, libraries) in the
        sites/\<sitename> directory
  • drush, git and ansible to manage our stack cluster
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What of Sleeping Dogs?

  • Our mature workflow serves our customers and ourselves well…
  • …but it fails us, moving forward
  • Shifting external requirements continue to mount
    • Web accessibility and responsive design
    • Our security posture
    • Integrate CI/CD and QA
    • Increasingly rapid stack updates
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Enter DevOps

What is DevOps?
  • To radically yet seamlessly change our workflow
  • Rethink roles, rules, interactions, expectations
  • Stay current with tool and paradigm shifts
  • Learning from our peers and contributing back
  • Maintain and improve our service reputation
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Has DevOps Helped Us?

Yes.

“Achieving extraordinary results
from ordinary people.”

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DevOps?

You’re Soaking in It

  • Bi-weekly DevOps meeting
    • New concerns and opportunities
    • New tools
    • Paradigm shifts
    • Changing individual roles
  • Refactor our distribution and workflow
  • Cross-discipline training
  • Presentations on new proposals and tech
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Why multisite?

  • Misleading FUD on multisite
  • Stable
  • n-factor reduction in duplicate stack code
  • Faster and inexpensive code updates
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Preparing for Drupal 8

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How, then?

Distribution reference

  • Maintain a “reference” D8 installation for managing core, based on the Drupal Project composer template
  • Run composer update against the reference
    • If there are updates, this will also update the composer.lock file
  • Commit the composer.lock file updates to the core git repo
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Core and Code Deployment

Switch from ansible to GitLab CE CI/CD
  • The value of recent GitLab updates
  • Trigger deployment updates from the GitLab UI.

Oops… NoOps!

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Core and Code Deployment

Use a GitLab’s CI/CD to
  • composer install with the updated lock file to distributed D8 cores.
    • Far less expensive than composer update on all cores.
  • Run QA tests as part of a build process
    • (Still in development)
  • Consistently run deployment scripts
  • Deploy website code to our staging and production servers
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Core and Website Updates

Run a pipeline on targeted servers
  • For all child sites:
    • Move website to maintenance mode
    • Database and code backup for all child websites
  • Pull composer.lock file
  • Composer install (core only)
  • For all child sites:
    • Drupal database update
    • Cache rebuild
  • Reapply permissions on core or website directories only
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GitLab CI/CD Demo

Link

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Features and Benefits

  • Eliminates need for manual deployment
  • “True” push-button deployment for our devs
  • Consistent deployment execution
  • Consistent state restoration
  • Easy access to deployment logs by all
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Hindsight = 20/20

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What’s Next?

  • Library management: big hairy eyeball
  • Implement varnish and pound for D8
  • Build and maintain our own installation profile
  • Trigger deployments with commit tags
  • Improve integration of website-level configuration management
  • Backport what we can to our D7 workflow
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Questions?

?

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Thank You!

!

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