DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014: Turning Drupal Into a Machine for Automated Deployment

Speakers: pwolaninNick_vh
Acquia Search is a hosted Apache Solr service that Acquia has provided with each subscription since 2009.

Last year, the service was re-launched behind the scenes on a new infrastructure to provide even more automation and integration with our other systems. Taking concepts in part from Drupal Gardens, we built a Drupal site that serves as a deployment machine: it receives data via Services module to create or update nodes. The data on the nodes is then used to configure load balancer and Apache Solr servers using a combination of git and direct ssh tasks using phpseclib.

This talk will include

A summary of the existing challenges to operations and development of new features
A high-level picture of how this is orchestrated by Drupal
How server configuration is managed for Apache Solr
Request handling with Nginx to help our load balancing process
How this scales for up to 4000+ Solr cores.
How we spawn new search cores for customers automatically.
Some more detailed explanations of how Drupal modules, the Drupal queue, and PHP libraries are leveraged.
We hope you will come out of this talk with a new view of Drupal as a potential automation tool, and think about building your own system or adopting existing projects like Aegir or DevShop to help manage your deployment.