Posted by coderintherye on April 25, 2010 at 5:12am
Acquia Enterprise Drupal
0% (0 votes)
CSU/UC managed Drupal on Amazon Web Services
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CSU/UC managed Drupal on another cloud service
0% (0 votes)
Self-managed Drupal servers on individual campuses in Central IT
0% (0 votes)
Self-managed Drupal servers spread out among depts. on individual campuses
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Other
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Total votes: 0
Comments
The difference between Acquia
The difference between Acquia vs. Drupal on AWS would be that the first option involves Acquia managing all the servers whereas the second option would be CSU/UC employees managing the server instances.
Personally, I'm quite undecided at the moment. I floated this idea briefly with Dries (while trying not to be too much of a fanboy) and Kieran, and they may potentially work with us to try to create some sort of model which would meet the needs of all of our campuses, but something that we could all afford. What I mean is, we should potentially be able to save a lot of money by using our combined weight. What do you think?
In the meantime, I will be thinking about my own answer.
Drupal evangelist.
www.CoderintheRye.com
HIPPA/FERPA/etc
I think given privacy requirements that we have as public institutions, having a centrally managed Aegir/Mercury setup (or something similar) on site let's us minimize the sysadmin work while not having to worry too much about storing sensitive information for intranet/protected pages.
My worry about"CSU/UC Managed
My worry about"CSU/UC Managed Drupal" is that it may move very slowly with policy decisions because of the challenge of arriving at consensus between all consumers of the service. My impression is that mgmt at UCB would like to see a big player (like Acquia) running the service so long as they addressed all of UCBs needs.
Josh Koenig made some interesting distinctions between AWS and Rackspace Cloud in the Mercury presentation: AWS is focused on "computing" you pay for processing cycles and a variety of other things. Rackspace is focused on "hosting" -- Drupal hosting is simpler on Rackspace. (ChapterThree and Rackspace have a close relationship presently.)
On that note, I have a quote
On that note, I have a quote from Acquia for campus wide Drupal hosting. Does anyone have a quote from Rackspace? Think it would be appropriate for me to share quotes in this space?
Drupal evangelist.
www.CoderintheRye.com
Having worked a little with
Having worked a little with the UC and System Wide Pricing initiatives it's usually chosen that the UC negotiates a rate for a year that people can buy into. So in the case of hosting we would negotiate Pantheon, for example, from $50 a month to $40 a month and it would be up to the other campuses to leverage that contract for themselves. I don't think central hosting is something, at least the UC is interested in.
At UC Merced we have just started looking at what it would cost to host some of our services off site. We are definitely concerned with what happens to our data so we are slow moving as we try to figure out what risks are out there. If I could feel comfortable, data protection wise, of managed hosting my perfect setup would be a managed host running aegir deploying mercury sites. I don't think Chapter Three is ready for this yet, but I know they are moving towards that direction.
To me the big game changers for drupal in Higher Ed are:
1) Aegir - The ability to easily create, mange, and upgrade multiple sites is very important. I know most Universities are fractured and our university is unique in that 98% of the sites are handled through central IT, but I see more and more universities centralizing IT in order to save money so this will become bigger as time rolls on.
2) Mercury/PressFlow - Setting up a highly tuned drupal instance can take a lot of time. This brings the ability to have each site tuned quickly and when budgets are tight having the ability to run 100, 200, 300+ sites on a single server is very enticing.
3) Scholar - If you haven't had the chance to look at http://scholar.harvard.edu take a look. It really shows off the power of what drupal can do and it's something that I feel Faculty and Grad Students will really love. You can download it and install it yourself at http://sourceforge.net/projects/scholar/
Ok so I went a little off topic at the end, but I think these are the areas that Universities can focus their efforts in to make Drupal successful.
Implementations
So very happy to have you on board!
1) I think is a very good option, as soon as it matures. I tried early versions of Aegir and it was nowhere near ready at the time, however I haven't got to see newer versions yet (presentations on it were full at DrupalCon and haven't had the time to try reinstalling again). The concept is great though, and it's obvious the implementation will eventually be there.
2) I am not to keen on, although I think it brings up the excellent question of what would a hosted solution look like. Pressflow is not designed for authenticated only sites, rather focusing on scaling for anonymous traffic. Thus, for many University use cases, especially in terms of providing portals, it would not work. There does seem to be two clear cut use cases though defined so far a) marketing/public b) intranet
3) is actually perfectly on topic and goes right into a question that was posed to me recently by management regarding providing student sites via Drupal. I had actually seen this at some point but let it slip by.
You left out 4) though which would be Acquia Enterprise hosting: http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-hosting The UC and CSU (and community colleges for that matter) could negotiate just as easily with Acquia for enterprise wide hosting or per campus. Indeed, the more I think of it, I like the idea of having a standard Acquia build that could be used if desired, but each campus gets its own implementation via Acquia (and thus its own AWS slice). Just an idea though, which is why we are here to find the best ideas.
Regarding your earlier statements regarding the UC, I can't claim to know UC politics, and the flying spaghetti monster knows I wish to stay out of them, but I can say that I know the UC hosts Melvyl for systemwide library catalog software. Of course, I'm assuming they contract it out. The UC system has a stated goal of reducing software acquisition costs. Same goes for the CSU system which hosts a systemwide Sharepoint implementation, though I think they manage it themselves.
By the way, hope you enjoy the book ;)
Drupal evangelist.
www.CoderintheRye.com
Aegir is still not the
Aegir is still not the easiest to setup although by 0.4 final there will be a script that makes it easier. But creating and migrating sites are still very easy. After managing my sites using multisite I can really see the pain points in upgrading and migration.
Most of my sites that I set up are non authenticated. Most departmental websites are not authenticated and are mainly brochure sites. So it really helps with those. And although caching is an issue for authenticated sites there are still pages that can be cached when authenticated. For example the pages that remain static when authenticated. Also being authenticated still takes advantage of memcache, etc.
As far as number 4 I wasn't trying to suggest Pantheon over Acquia. I was just using them as an example. Problem with acquia is the fact that they use AWS. With the price difference of AWS and rackspace Acquia seems like it will always come out more expensive. Also I think the university would be more interested in a system wide agreement with a company like RackSpace rather than Acquia since it gives it more flexibility as far as what software could be hosted. Thinking about automatically setting up instances Linode has their stack scripts that provide an easy way to get a server setup and configured just by running a script.
Melvyl is outsourced at least at UC Merced. The main thing at UC is I don't think anyone is prepared to be a System Wide Rackspace, so the best I think the UC can do as a whole is negotiate terms with a provider like RackSpace. Which may be a good thing since the terms would be sure to include privacy requirements. There is precedence as far as negotiating privacy terms since I believe we have a contract with Google and gmail.
Thanks for the book can't wait to see what it is!! :)
Just to add to that, I saw
Just to add to that, I saw the Rackspace press releases, but took a little digging to find more info: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/sites
Would be good to start getting some quotes from them on different sizing options. One thing I am working on currently is a Cost/Benefit analysis of the various Drupal hosting options.
You are most likely correct that Acquia will be the most expensive option, though coming with 24/7 support is a big selling point, that is another thing to find, some people who have used Acquia and/or Rackspace and can give some reviews on the hosting & support.
Drupal evangelist.
www.CoderintheRye.com
Ditto on the COs office running things
After our experience with PeopleSoft and other Chancellor's Office initiatives to centralize services like this I would say that it is better for campuses to try and find their own path. I'm concerned that if you have a centrally managed distribution is might slow down adoption of new technologies or developments from the community - just like getting a mod on PS takes like five years and three sacrificial goats.
Another issue with a canonical system-wide approach is that it would preclude us from differentiating approaches between instances. For example, we have a Drupal student portal which hosts FERPA data and is locked within a DMZ and can't even access external web services - port 443 only. That's cool for that implementation; however, we also have external marketing sites which we want to talk liberally with services like Google Analytics/Mollom, etc., which requires being placed in a much different networking environment. I'd be resistant to hand over these kind of configuration decisions to our CO.
We have been looking at AWS, but the price point is very similar to having the same server in our virtualized server environment.
I see your point, as we also
I see your point, as we also have DMZ zone implementations, as well as public-facing implementations.
I also somewhat agree with the problem with the Chancellor's office, however I think that we have one major problem working against us there, which is that if the Chancellor's office pushes negotiated software contracts down from above, then many campuses will adopt it. Case in point is Sharepoint. Our instance at SF State is now on their managed servers.
We have to look at the big picture, if we could be the ones defining how these services are implemented (I say services, because yes we would need at least two instances, one internal facing only and one external facing to the web), then we could go a long ways towards a successful implementation which means most (but not all) needs.
Either way, I'm not going to try to define the strategy, that is something for us all to decide, but we definitely need a clear strategy with deliverables, perhaps the first being a showcase site which shows off both the features of Drupal as well as shows off the work that has already been done on California campuses.
Drupal evangelist.
www.CoderintheRye.com