Decoupling at Scale (Alexa US Top 100 Site): Patch.com's Rebirth on Drupal
This presentation will distill lessons learned by Patch.com operating an Alexa US Top 100 site for those looking to operate and innovate Drupal at scale. Patch.com was spun out of it's corporate parent (AOL) and re-built from the ground up by a new in-house team on Drupal. The new decoupled Drupal 7 sites powers 50 million page views a month across 35 million URLs, 40 terabytes of images, 500 terabytes of video, 6 million registered users, 15 million articles.
During this six month transition, Patch went from:
- Sixty engineers to eight engineers
- A custom CMS to a decoupled Drupal 7 site
- 96 internally managed servers to an outsourced container based cloud platform
- Slow complex release cycles to deploying new substantive changes weekly
Patch's traffic is now growing healthily, publishing has expanded to many new regions, and the business has become profitable. If you would like to learn from our lessons learned, this session will focus on the nuts and bolts of operating decoupled Drupal sites at scale. We will cover how to:
- Leverage a decoupled architecture to increase the rate of innovation
- How to architect your Drupal sites to follow the microservices pattern to de-risk your project and speed up innovation
- How to recruit and enable Drupal developers to truly be 'full stack' on large, complex sites
- How to manage high rate of deployments to speed up cycle times (innovation) while minimizing risk
- How to explain and sell the benefits internally at your organization
- Many other lessons we've learned the hard way