February 25, 2011

The secret is out – Drupal has become the ‘go-to’ open source software for the publication and management of website content. By pairing Drupal with cloud technologies there is a whole new world of user benefits well beyond scale and performance.

In this session, Bret Piatt, director, technical alliances at Rackspace Hosting and members of the Drupal community will discuss how to best take advantage of cloud technologies with Drupal sites. The panel presentation will address:

  • Leveraging the cloud ecosystem for managing configuration, code, and backups 
  • How to scale Drupal clusters by integrating with cloud APIs 
  • Enhancing site scale and performance by taking advantage of cloud file storage/CDN 
  • Cloud/Drupal success stories such as Chapter Three’s ( http://www.chapterthree.com ) on Mercury, a Drupal PaaS built on The Rackspace Cloud’s Cloud Servers

Quick note: It's humbling to see that we got so many good ratings. I hope those who were looking for "more content/less evangelism" made it to today's BoF, which was also great, and join us on the Drupal group and check out the source.

Finally, a clarification. At one point I mentioned that there was some code in our system which talked to the Rackspace API which we wouldn't be releasing. That's both not entirely true, and to the extent that it's true, is a matter of choice for us. Let me explain.

Our cloud communication layer runs libcloud, which implements a wonderful common API for many cloud platforms. However, it's just a python library, so we needed to create a service around that. This hasn't been accepted into libcloud's SVN, but we're working on it, and the code will be 100% open-sourced. Additionally, we have an custom Drupal module which implements this service — currently via an Ubercart hook — to handle the business logic of when and how to launch a server. This is not fit for public release at this point, but we have a roadmap to contribute the service implementation piece as part of the 0.4 revision cycle for Aegir. This will allow savvy users to set up a cloudhub socket, and launch new cloud instances using their Aegir server!

However, much like the site theme, the exact module that runs our management console will not be released. To be clear — since I know there was a bit of confusion here — that's 100% our decision and has nothing to do with Rackspace. ;)