Leveraging Drupal as an enterprise platform:  Best practices

In this session, we are going to talk about an enterprise-level solution based on one Drupal profile that helped us to build, support, and evolve nearly five hundred sites. Attendees of this session will learn about the necessary tools, techniques, and methodologies we leveraged from a technical and management point of view.

We will discuss lessons learned through our four-year journey covering hundreds of sites built and maintained by various teams around the world to a single corporate solution. Attendees of this session will learn: 

1. How to organize a stable development lifecycle and keep good source code quality for a program with dozens of developers 

2. How to manage six different development teams while using different project management methodologies 

3. How our architects help us make strategic decisions and follow best practices 

4. Why we need a separate R&D team to build supplementary tools which make our work easier and more productive 

5. Why keeping a huge knowledge base is critically important for us 

With a vast number of sites built on single distribution, this requires a significant effort for routine activities such as deployments, upgrades, testing, new features, and launch process. We will discuss how a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) platform and other tools will help to automate such activities and optimize costs. In the session, we will also demonstrate how such tools help us avoid vendor lock for cloud hosting and perform full, incremental and bulk deployments for the multisite clusters.