Drupal Site Hosting and Management: Acquia Case Studies from the Frontlines

Drupal Site Hosting and Management: Acquia Customer Stories

Jim Salem VP, Platform Services

Acquia @jcsalem

Bryan House Sr. Director, Marketing Acquia @bryanhouse

Upcoming Webinars

  Thursday June 10th – Views Askew: Using the Many Forms of Drupal Views

  Thursday June 17th

- 90 Minute Introduction to the Fusion Theming Framework for Drupal

Register Today - http://acquia.com/webinars

Agenda

  Overview Acquia Hosting   Customer case studies

–  Performance –  Scalability –  Flexibility –  Support

  Summary   Q&A

Drupal Optimized Cloud-based Hosting

Scalable, High Performance Infrastructure

  Hosted on AWS, SAS 70 certified platform

  Highly available   Caching & load balancing

via Varnish, Nginx   Opcode caching   Fault-tolerant HA file system   Nightly offsite backups   4 hour snapshots passive

db active

db

web node

web node

web node

balancer page caching

balancer page caching

file server

file server

synchronous db failover

HA file server

How is Acquia Hosting Unique?

 Highly-available, elastic architecture

 Optimized for Drupal scalability & performance

 One-stop shop - “No finger-pointing”

 World class Drupal and systems expertise

Who’s Using Acquia Hosting?

Performance Scalability

Flexibility Support

Global PR Firm

ForeignPolicy.com - Performance

Background: ForeignPolicy.com

  Award-winning magazine for global politics, economics and ideas

  Foreign Policy’s website goal – extend magazine’s reach

  Why Drupal?

–  “We needed something that would meet our growing needs… something scalable and flexible”

ForeignPolicy.com Challenges

  To start – they hosted their site internally

  Struggled with success –  Rapid content growth –  Social features to share content –  Infrastructure limitations impacted site performance

ForeignPolicy.com Challenges

  We “weren’t prepared for how quickly the site would grow thanks to the new content and easier ways of sharing it”

  “Things were rough for a while. There just wasn’t the hardware and infrastructure … to ramp up growth so quickly”

Intelligent Page Caching

ForeignPolicy.com and Acquia

  “Acquia is the one-stop solution for us”   Benefits

–  Better site performance & scaling   “We don’t have to worry about the site crashing in case one of

our articles attracts attention”

–  24x7 Support   “If something does go wrong, Acquia responds quickly and

doesn’t stop until they find the source of the problem.”

–  Technical access to site   “It was key for us that Acquia provide the support… but that

we still have full access to work with our environment.”

Global PR Firm - Scalability

Global PR Firm

A Global PR Firm

  Major business news announcement –  Expected 20 million unique visitors the first day

– Major business implication should the site fail

  Why Drupal? –  Drupal enabled them to quickly make site changes

during the day of the announcement

  Critical success factor –  Budgeted time for load testing from the start

What is Load Testing?

  An industry best practice to insure performance   Load testing cloud services

–  Soasta CloudTest –  BrowsterMob

  DIY load testing –  Jmeter –  Siege –  The Grinder – Goofy (an Acquia-developed open source tool)

Problems at their previous ISP

  Originally, Global PR Firm chose a traditional, well-known hosting provider

  Problems – No Drupal expertise – Hosting firm couldn’t provide a cost-effective hosting

environment that scaled to PR firm’s needs  Failed PR Firm’s load testing

  So… – One week before launch they called Acquia

Scalable, Elastic Architecture

Global PR Firm Results

  Rigorous load testing prior to the big day –  Tested Acquia Hosting using Soasta CloudTest

 5,000 requests/second!  320 mbits/sec traffic  830 page views/sec

–  Found hardware configuration best suited to needs   Successful site launch, no hiccups

–  “best web launch … ever”   After the storm…

– Acquia scaled down hardware configuration to meet steady-state traffic conditions, saving them $$$

MotherJones.com - Flexibility

Mother Jones

  Non-profit news organization that specializes in investigative, political & social justice reporting

–  Launched web site in 1993

  Why Drupal?

–  Flexibility of Drupal platform

– Ability to add new functionality quickly - modular architecture

Previous Hosting Challenges

  Mother Jones faced a series of challenges with their first hosting provider – Uptime –  Performance –  Spambots –  Log access

Proactive Monitoring, High Availability

Mother Jones and Acquia

  Why Acquia? – One stop shop for entire Drupal infrastructure – Hosting, support, and remote administration

  Improved site performance – Drupal site optimization – More aggressive page caching

  Faster support issue resolution –  Reduced site downtime

Mother Jones and Acquia

  “Our initial team simply weren’t experienced at preparing an iron-clad architecture that could withstand traffic intensive demands. Acquia is clearly experienced, and has specific strategies, testing procedures, and monitoring tools to ensure we can handle traffic loads today, tomorrow, and next year.”

  “Acquia has demonstrated superior expertise in a very simple way – they excel at discovering and solving problems immediately.”

Robert Wise, System Administrator, MotherJones.com

New York State Senate - Support

New York State Senate

  Previous sites –  Static, brochure-ware –  No standardization across senators, sites all different –  Little discourse, less value to citizens

  Ground-breaking Gov 2.0 web strategy –  “We are regarded as having one of the best legislative sites

in the country.” –  Creative Commons to keep all information open and free

  Why Drupal? –  Repeatable framework for senator microsite deployment –  Content sharing & reuse across sites –  Robust permissions and access controls

New York State Senate and Acquia

  Primary drivers for Acquia selection –  Reliability of hosting infrastructure – Availability of enterprise-class support

  Results –  Improved content access, all Senate administrative

and legislative data available online –  Increased citizen participation

New York State Senate and Acquia

  “Acquia offers a quality of support that I haven’t seen before in the Drupal community. They are responsive and proactive. They aren’t content just to see the site running smoothly-- Acquia is always looking for new modules and features that can help us better realize our vision for our site.”

Andrew Hoppin, CIO, NYSenate.gov

Many Reasons to Choose Acquia Hosting

Performance Scalability

Flexibility Support

Global PR Firm

one-stop shop Drupal application + infrastructure support

Benefits of Acquia Hosting

 Highly-available, elastic architecture

 Optimized for Drupal scalability & performance

 One-stop shop - “No finger-pointing”

 World class Drupal and systems expertise

  Do you love working with Drupal?

  If so, Acquia is hiring: – Engineering & design – Operations – Client advisors and consulting – Inside sales

Check out openings at http://acquia.com/careers

Questions

  For more information, visit: –  http://acquia.com –  http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-hosting –  http://twitter.com/acquia –  http://twitter.com/drupalgardens –  http://facebook.com/acquia

  Contact us: –  [email protected]

–  888.9.ACQUIA   Try Drupal 7 for free

–  Sign up for beta code at http://drupalgardens.com

  Sign up for a free 30-day Acquia Network Trial –  http://acquia.com/trial

Recording of today’s event and slides will be posted at:

http://acquia.com/community/resources/recorded_webinars