Drupal Site Hosting and Management: Acquia Customer Stories
Jim Salem VP, Platform Services
Acquia @jcsalem
Bryan House Sr. Director, Marketing Acquia @bryanhouse
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Agenda
Overview Acquia Hosting Customer case studies
– Performance – Scalability – Flexibility – Support
Summary Q&A
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
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”
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.”
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
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 $$$
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
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
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
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
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