Building a cloud-native SaaS for CERN's 1k Drupal sites

Following our presentation 'Survival kit for CERN's organic webscape', let's take a deep dive into the design of our highly automated, open source Drupal SaaS on Kubernetes. We hope to seed discussion on a lean infrastructure to manage thousands of Drupal websites.

We present our infrastructure that automates the lifecycle of websites at CERN to better serve site builders with little technical engagement with Drupal. It offers one-click provisioning, updates, backups, cloning, deleting, without taking more complex workflows away from power users. We package Drupal and a curated set of modules as the "CERN Drupal Distribution" that all websites derive from, but site admins can incorporate more modules with a source-to-image build. Kubernetes sits at the heart of our design. We don't use Kubernetes simply as a deployment platform; rather, we represent websites as objects in the Kubernetes API, benefitting from an industry standard and pluggable language.
Website lifecycle is implemented as a controller that watches this API: the Operator pattern.

We demonstrate that an all-junior team is up to the task.
All our work is Apache licenced :D