Why Build Your Own Cloud Native Drupal Platform? | OPTASY

Why or rather "when" should you consider building your own cloud native Drupal platform?

Is a container-based infrastructure a viable solution for you? For your business needs?

How do you know if your specific use case calls for a cloud-native Drupal development environment?

And, assuming that you've run your own evaluation and that your use case does demand a switch from your current VM to a... multi-cloud Drupal hosting architecture:

How do you make Drupal... cloud native friendly?

So that you can build, deploy, scale and manage fast and resilient Drupal apps in the cloud?

In this post, we commit to answering all your key cloud-native and Drupal-related questions:

"What does cloud-native mean exactly?"
"What is cloud-native with respect to Drupal?"
"Why do I need a cloud native Drupal platform anyway?"
"What are the biggest advantages and their... flip sides?"

1. What Does Cloud Native Mean Exactly?

What is a cloud-native application?

It's a holistic approach to designing, building, and running applications that make the most of cloud-native concepts.

Or, if you wish:

Cloud-native application development is a methodology — covering all stages of an app's lifecycle: design, deployment... operations — for developing apps that run in the cloud.

Applications that use the cloud computing model to its full potential.

DevOps, agile, microservices and other modern software architectures all fall under the umbrella of a cloud-native methodology.

Therefore, it's fast, resilient, highly scalable and easily maintainable applications that you get to run in a cloud-native infrastructure.

2. And What Is Cloud Native with Respect to Drupal?

In other words: where does Drupal fit in this revolution in how we develop and deploy our applications?

Overall, taking full advantage of a cloud native Drupal development environment means:

Finding the best solution for handling decentralized storage, auto-scaling, auto-provisioning and multi-region fault tolerance.

Getting the most of cloud-native and Drupal comes down to:

minimizing the use of long-running servers
relying more on purpose-built services and elastic computing
setting up a development environment where you can easily test your new themes and modules, fix bugs, build, and deploy resilient enterprise Drupal apps

3. Why Build Your Own Cloud Native Drupal Platform? And When?

For there are cases (is this your case, too?) when such a powerful, yet... challenging architecture is not justified by the company's business needs.

So, let's answer your "when" question first.

You're better off with a cloud-native infrastructure, where you deploy Kubernetes and containers, if:

you're dealing with high traffic, high volume applications and polyglot architecture
you already have an Ops team
you've already made at least some sort of investments in the private or public cloud
your current requirements in terms of costs and control justify setting up a multi-cloud architecture
you're running and maintaining an entire ecosystem of Drupal sites

"OK, so it looks like I "qualify" for it. But still: what would be the biggest advantages of building my own cloud-native platform compared to opting for a cloud vendor's services?"

Here are the 2 most obvious advantages:

you'd avoid getting locked-in to a cloud provider
you'd avoid growing dependant of your PaaS provider for hosting, scaling, and managing your own Drupal apps

4. Why Would You Want to Containerize Your Drupal Apps in the First Place?

What would be your major wins if you ran Drupal in containers?

Here are the 3 most significant ones:

repeatability and consistency: you get the same predictable and specific result with each container that you run
less maintenance work
an easier way to run PHP upgrades compared to a conventional VM stack where you depend on your host for that and where there's a whole cluster of sites that needs to get PHP upgraded simultaneously

5. 3 Pillers of a Container-Based Infrastructure: Drupal, Kubernetes, Docker

What goes into a cloud-native Drupal platform? There are 3 key players involved:

5.1. Drupal

The robust content management system which, beginning with its 8th major version, grew into a Symfony-based content management framework.

Backed by a huge (100K+) and active community of contributors and a rich plugin ecosystem, Drupal powers a wide variety of web applications: media and entertainment apps, non-profit, gov, education...

5.2. Kubernetes

It's the standard container orchestration technology.

In the context of your future cloud-native infrastructure, you'll be using it to manage:

your containers' lifecycle
command and control
distribution
scheduling

5.3. Docker

It's the standard... tool that you will be using for creating your containers.

6. 4 Cloud-Native Platform Features to Put on Your Wishlist

What feature requirements should you have with respect to your Drupal development environment?

Here's how a... decent wishlist should look like:

it should provide a layer of abstraction over IaaS
it should handle cross-cutting concerns
it should be easily scalable and secure
it should provide an efficient developer experience (and agile operator experience, as well)

7. Deploying Your Drupal Apps on the Cloud: Requests & Constraints

What's the proper set-up for a container-based Drupal architecture?

"What are the key requirements that my future cloud-native Drupal platform should meet?" you might legitimately ask yourself.

your Drupal application should be turned into a containerized stack
minimal Ops (or not Ops at all)
it should run properly on any cloud
your public/private file should be externalized
it should scale up, out, and down
it should make the most of PaaS services: for gateways, databases, load balances, cache stores, queues
it should tap into an operational model: new app provisioning-routing-monitoring...
your development team should be able to get high fidelity local environments up and running in no time

"And what challenges should I expect?" you'll further wonder:

your developers are faced with a steep learning curve: they should have some sort of understanding of what's happening under the hood when deploying Kubernetes
CI & Delivery Pipeline
logical architecture
monitoring and management
Dev & Build Tools
local development

Now, as for how to build your own cloud-native Drupal platform, the Srijan team does a wonderful job explaining it, step by step, in their webinar's slide deck.

From scaling your LAMP stack app architecture to LA/E/MP concurrency model to... deployment models and monitoring, they'll get you through all the main considerations behind adopting this modern approach to Drupal hosting.

The END!

What do you think:

Is a cloud native Drupal development environment a viable solution for you?

Are the advantages highlighted here relevant enough for your use case and business needs? Or are the outlined challenges too discouraging for you?

Feel free to share with us any thoughts and concerns that you might have regarding the idea of building your own cloud native Drupal platform.

Photo by C Dustin on Unsplash

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Drupal Drupal 8

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Adriana Cacoveanu / Apr 03'2020

Drupal Drupal 8

Drupal Layout Builder vs Gutenberg: How Do You Know Which Page Builder’s Right for You?

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Silviu Serdaru / Mar 25'2020

Drupal Drupal 8

Drupal Voice Search: How to Set Up Search Based on Voice Recognition on Your Drupal Site

Drupal voice search has gone from trend to standard these days. So, you can't help ask yourself: "How do I enable search based on voice recognition on my Drupal website?" And that's precisely the question that I'm about to answer in this blog post. That, along with all the other ones that must be "haunting" you: How does voice search impact my revenues? How do I optimize my website content for voice search queries? How do I set up a custom voice search engine on my Drupal site? Can I even build a voice-powered app with Drupal? How? 1. How Does Voice Search Impact Your Traffic, Conversions, Revenues? “Voice Shopping Set to Jump to $40 Billion By 2022, Rising From $2 Billion Today“ (source: prnewswire.com) How does making your Drupal website voice search-friendly translate into higher conversion rates? 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Configuring Drupal for Voice Search: Optimize Your Content for Google's Featured Snippets I'm not going to get into details here, but there are lots of highly valuable MOZ blog posts on this topic that I recommend you have a look at. 2.5. Center Your Drupal Voice Search Strategy Around Question Keywords “How to...”, “What to...”, “Why use...” 2.6. Make Sure to Include (Really) Long-Tail Keywords Into Your Content 5+ word keywords, I mean. 3. Set Up a Drupal Voice Search Engine in Just a Few Steps How do you create a search system based on voice on your Drupal website? Image by Kaufdex from Pixabay Here are the easy steps to creating a custom voice search engine with Expertrec: First of all, you need a google tag manager account, a Gmail id, access to your Drupal admin dashboard and a valid sitemap Set up an account on https://cse.expertrec.com??platform=cse using your Gmail ID Enter your website's URL login to your Drupal admin panel and install google tag manager: https://www.drupal.org/project/google_tag Enter your google tag manager ID and save the configuration Access https://cse.expertrec.com/csedashboard/home/code and copy that code Add the first part of the code in your control panel, using Google tag manager Use the custom HTML option and configure the trigger to place it on all the web pages on your Drupal site where you want the voice search enabled Go to Structure-> Block layout-> Header ->Place block-> Add custom block-> click on source and enter: <ci-search></ci-search> (opt for "full HTML"). It's this code that will display a search box in your website's header Hit the Save button and finally, navigate to UI customization->features-> enable voice search And that's it: 9 simple steps to add voice search to your Drupal site. 4. Building Your Own Voice App: Why Would You Want to Use Drupal? Now, let's say that you've optimized your Drupal website for voice search, improved your search ranking and given your traffic a major boost. And you've decided to go further and... build your first voice app, as well. Why would you use Drupal to build it? Here are some of the most solid reasons: Drupal provides you with a sophisticated user permissions and access control system it allows you to restrict access to content it provides you with fieldable content it ships with a pre-built front-end Drupal it enables you to put together complex content workflows it provides multi-language support out of the box it provides you with an API module Note: in the end, it's your use case, along with all the specific feature needs deriving from there, that should influence your final decision. But how would your Drupal voice app work, more precisely? Here's the whole "mechanism" in the back-end, summed up to 4 stages: the user talks to the voice assistant (Alexa, Siri, Cortana...) the voice assistant talks to Drupal Drupal provides an answer to the voice assistant the voice assistant delivers the answer to the user Chatbot API is the module that makes communication between Drupal and the AI voice assistant possible. It integrates, out of the box, with Dialogue Flow and Alexa. I won't go into detail on the basics of a voice-powered app and the fundamentals of a VUI design. Yet, I recommend you watched the DrupalCon session on Powering an Alexa App with Drupal. It includes a handful of useful tips and actionable information on building a Drupal-powered voice search. In this chapter, my sole intention was to outline those Drupal features and functionalities that make it the best candidate for a voice app. The END! I won't hide it: I'm curious whether you've already got your Drupal website voice-search friendly or not just yet. What strategies have you implemented so far to make your content more findable for vocal queries? Have you set up your own Drupal voice search engine? Are there any obstacles that Drupal challenged you with? That made the whole optimization for voice search more complex than expected? Let us know in the comments below. Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash ... Read more

Adriana Cacoveanu / Mar 23'2020

Why Would You Build Your Own Cloud Native Drupal Platform? The Main Benefits and Challenges to Consider

1. What Does Cloud Native Mean Exactly?

2. And What Is Cloud Native with Respect to Drupal?

3. Why Build Your Own Cloud Native Drupal Platform? And When?

4. Why Would You Want to Containerize Your Drupal Apps in the First Place?