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

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

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

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

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

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

Has DevOps Helped Us?

Yes.

“Achieving extraordinary results
from ordinary people.”

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

Why multisite?

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

Preparing for Drupal 8

• Confirm continued D.O. support for multisite past 9.x
  • Yep: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2306013
• Confirm our understanding of Drupal 8 multisite
  • Yep: https://people.duke.edu/~kds38/drupal/drupal-8-multisite-documentation/ BUT
• composer replaces drush for managing Drupal
• A “pure” composer-based workflow conflicts with
  • Managing the individual website instances
  • JavaScript library dependency resolution

How, then?

Distribution reference

• Maintain a “reference” D8 installation for managing core, based on the Drupal Project composer template
  • https://github.com/drupal-composer/drupal-project
• 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

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!

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

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

GitLab CI/CD Demo

Link

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

Questions?

?

Thank You!

!