drupal

I realized I haven't posted about my DrupalCon Seattle 2019 session titled Everything I know about Kubernetes I learned from a cluster of Raspberry Pis, so I thought I'd remedy that. First, here's a video of the recorded session:

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The original Pi Dramble 6-node cluster, running the LAMP stack.

tl;dr: You can now sponsor my open source development work via GitHub Sponsors.

GitHub Sponsors is the latest foray into building a more sustainable future for open source software development. There have been many attempts before, a few of which I tried (Gratipay, Patreon, etc.), but most of them never reached a critical mass, and at most you'd end up getting maybe $20-50/month out of the platform. Another prolific open source contributor I've long followed wrote about the topic of open source support and developer burnout in a post this year, Webform, Drupal, and Open Source...Where are we going?.

Kubernetes is taking over the world of infrastructure management, at least for larger-scale operations, and best practices have started to solidify. One of those best practices is the cultivation of Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to describe your applications in a Kubernetes-native way, and Operators to manage your the Custom Resources running on your Kubernetes clusters.

In the Drupal community, Kubernetes uptake has been somewhat slow, but is on the rise. Just like with Docker adoption for local development, the tooling and documentation has been slowly percolating. For example, Tess Flynn from TEN7 has been boldly going where no one has gone before (oops, wrong scifi series!) using the Force to promote Drupal usage in a Kubernetes environment.

Since 2014, I've been working for Acquia, doing some fun work with a great team in Professional Services. I started out managing some huge Drupal site builds for Acquia clients, and ended up devoting all my time for the past couple years to some major infrastructure projects, diving deeper into operations work, Ansible, AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes in production.

In that same time period, I began work on my second book, Ansible for Kubernetes, but have not had the dedicated time to get too deep into writing—especially now that I have three young kids. When I started writing Ansible for DevOps, I had one newborn!

I'm on the flight home from this year's North American DrupalCon. Couldn't sleep, so thought I'd jot down a few words after a great experience in Seattle.

Last year, some remember seeing me walking the halls in Nashville akin to a zombie. But not the hungry, flesh-eating kind... more like the thin, scraggly, zoned-out kind. Last year my health was very poor. I went to DrupalCon mostly because it was the first DrupalCon within driving distance of St. Louis since DrupalCon Chicago several years ago. In hindsight it might not have been the best idea, and I had to skip a number of events due to my health.

Since that time, I experienced a grueling surgery and recovery, and learned to live with my new friend, the stoma. (Warning: scatalogical humor ahead—hey, it's my coping mechanism!).

Update: Since posting this, there have been some interesting new developments in this area, for example:

• There is now a Drupal/Kubernetes SIG which meets every other Wednesday.
• There are Kubernetes Drupal Operators which can manage Drupal instances in Kubernetes; I maintain the geerlingguy/drupal-operator but there are a couple others out there in development.

Since 2014, I've been working on various projects which containerized Drupal in a production environment. There have always been a few growing pains—there will for some time, as there are so few places actually using Docker or containers in a production environment (at least in a 'cloud native' way, without tons of volume mounts), though this is changing. It was slow at first, but it's becoming much more rapid.

It's been five years since Drupal VM's first release, and to celebrate, it's time to release Drupal VM 5.0 "Flynn Lives"! This update is not a major architectural shift, but instead, a new major version that updates many defaults to use the latest versions of the base VM OS and application software. Some of the new default versions include:

• Ubuntu 18.04 'Bionic' LTS (was Ubuntu 16.04)
• PHP 7.2 (was PHP 7.1)
• Node.js 10.x (was Node.js 6.x)

See the full release notes here: Drupal VM 5.0.0 "Flynn Lives"

There are also a number of other small improvements (as always), and ever-increasing test coverage for all the Ansible roles that power Drupal VM. And in the Drupal VM 4.x release lifecycle, a new official pre-baked Drupal VM base box was added, the geerlingguy/drupal-vm Vagrant base box. Using that base box can speed up new VM builds by 50% or more!

Thoughts about Drupal 8, Drupal 7, Backdrop, the Drupal Community, DrupalCon's meteoric price increases, DrupalCamps, and the future of the framework/CMS/enterprise experience engine that is Drupal have been bubbling up in the back of my mind for, well, years now.

I am almost always an optimist about the future, and Drupal 8 promised (and usually delivered) on many things:

• Vastly improved content administration
• Views in core, and even better than ever
• Media in core
• Layouts in core
• Modern programming paradigms (fewer #DrupalWTFs)
• 'Getting off the island' and becoming more of a normal PHP application (kinda the opposite of something like Wordpress)

But one thing that has always been annoying, and now is probably to the state of alarming, for some, is the fact that Drupal 8 adoption has still not hit a level of growth which will put it ahead of Drupal 7 adoption any time soon.

Update: The results are available for viewing in our presentation slides: download the 2019 Drupal Local Development presentation (PDF). There is also a video of the survey results presentation from DrupalCon Seattle.

It's that time of year again! Leading up to DrupalCon Seattle, Chris Urban and I are working on a presentation on Local Development environments for Drupal, and we have just opened up the 2019 Drupal Local Development Survey.

Local development environment usage results from 2018's survey.

tl;dr: See the video below for a run-through of my process upgrading Drupal core on the real-world open source Drupal 8 site codebase Drupal Example for Kubernetes.

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Over the years, as Drupal has evolved, the upgrade process has become a bit more involved; as with most web applications, Drupal's increasing complexity extends to deployment, and whether you end up running Drupal on a VPS, a bare metal server, in Docker containers, or in a Kubernetes cluster, you should formalize an update process to make sure upgrades are as close to non-events as possible.