Building a multisite platform using Drupal 8 and Aegir for all state websites in the Kingdom of Bhutan
anoopjohn
In this presentation, I am planning to share our experience in implementing a multi-site web-hosting platform on Drupal 8 and Aegir for Department of IT & Telecom (DITT), under the Ministry of Information and Communications, Govt. of Bhutan.
The requirement was to migrate 24 websites which are hosted and managed independently to a central platform. We reviewed all 24 existing websites which were implemented using multiple technologies and hosting environments, conduct the discovery workshop to identify the requirements, design and implement a high availability platform using Drupal 8 and Aegir that has a scalable architecture where it allows the admin to launch more sites as required.
Drupal and Aeigir were the key ingredients for the successful execution of this project. Careful project management and planning also helped us implement this with in the limited time and budget. This model can be re-used by any organizations, especially governments, to implement websites for local self-government bodies where the deployment and hosting need to be managed by a central authority and each website are managed independently.
In this session, I will cover
- Business problem that we solved
- Solution
- High-level architecture
- Challenges we faced and how we addressed those
- Training
- Lesson learned and takeaways
Key technologies used:
- Drupal 8 - Drupal 8 distribution with default content. We have used panalizer and a configurable theme to maximize the customization options for the webmasters of each website.
- Aegir - Clustering with Aegir is used as a hosting platform.
- Mysql - Master-Slave configuration helped us implement a highly reliable system.
- HAProxy - High availability was one key indicator of the success of this project which is achieved by 2 HAProxy installations and the heartbeat configuration.
- Debian GNU/Linux - The universal operating system.