Drupal, DevOps and Infrastructures in the brave new world of Distributed Systems

 

Distributed systems face incredible challenges — Photo by Dennis van Zuijlekom

With Drupal 8 reaching its maturity and coupling/decoupling from other services — including itself — we have an increasing demand for Drupal sites to shine and make engaged teams thrive with good DevOps practices and resilient Infrastructure. All that done in the biggest Distributed System ever created by humans: the Internet. The biggest challenges of any distributed system are heterogeneity of systems and clients, transparency to the end user, openness to other systems, concurrency to support many users simultaneously, security, scalability on the fly and failure handling in a graceful way. Are we there yet?

We envision, in the DevOps + Infrastructure track, to see solutions from the smallest containers that can grow to millions of services to best practices in the DevOps world that accomplish very specific tasks to support Drupal and teams working on it and save precious human time, by reducing repetitive and automatable tasks.

Questions about container orchestration, virtualization and cloud infrastructure arise every day and we expect answers to come in the track sessions to deal with automation and scaling faster — maybe using applied machine learning or some other forms of prediction or self management. See? We’re really into saving time, by using technology to assist us.

We clearly don’t manage our sites in the same way we did years ago, due to increased complexity of what we manage and how we are managing change in process and culture, therefore it’s our goal at Drupal Europe to bring the best ideas, stories and lessons learned from each industry into the room and share them with the community.

What’s your story?

How is your platform scaling? How do you solve automated testing and continuous integrations? How do you keep your team’s happiness with feature velocity and still maintain a healthy platform? How do you make your website’s perceived performance even faster? What chain of tooling is running behind the scenes and what is controlling this chain? Are you using agentless configuration management or are you resorting to an agent. Are you triggering events based on system changes or do you work with command and control.

Be ready to raise, receive and answer some hard questions and but most of all, inspire people to think from a different angle. What works for a high-high traffic website might not be applicable for maintaining a massive amount of smaller sites. We want operations to inspire development on reliability and for development to inspire operations on any kind of automation. We want security to be always top of mind while still have an impact on business value rapidly and efficiently. And that is just the beginning…

About industry tracks

Drupal Europe’s 2018 program is focused on industry verticals, which means there are tons of subjects to discuss therefore when you submit your sessionbe sure to choose the correct industry track in order to increase the chance of your session being selected.

Please help us to spread the word about this awesome conference. Our hashtag is #drupaleurope.

To recommend speakers or topics please get in touch at program@drupaleurope.org.

About the Drupal Europe Conference

Drupal is one of the leading open source technologies empowering digital solutions in the government space around the world.

Drupal Europe 2018 brings over 2,000 creators, innovators, and users of digital technologies from all over Europe and the rest of the world together for three days of intense and inspiring interaction.

Location & Dates

Drupal Europe will be held in Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany — which has a direct connection to Frankfurt International Airport. Drupal Europe will take place 10–14 September 2018 with Drupal contribution opportunities every day. Keynotes, sessions, workshops and BoFs will be from Tuesday to Thursday.