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Drupal Voices 181: Josh Koenig on Pantheon and Automating Deployment Best Practices

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Josh Koenig (aka joshk) is a long-time Drupal contributor and founder of Chapter 3 and the Pantheon project. Recently, the Pantheon project raised $1.3 million dollars, which has allowed Koenig, David Strauss, Matt Cheney and Zack Rosen to work full time on creating a toolset that helps implement Drupal deployment best practices with git and an intuitive user interface to help manage your development, staging and live servers.

Koenig talks about a lot of the different features of Pantheon, which was originally an open source Amazon web image called Mercury (as described here by Koenig at DrupalCon San Francisco. But now Pantheon is more of a hosted solution geared to make Drupal developer's lives a lot easier by allowing developers to focus on doing what they do best, which is developing Drupal sites and not doing a lot of the system administration tasks and managing best practice development environment infrastructures.

Pantheon was announcing a private beta at DrupalCon, and will be working with a small community of developers to get it ready for a public launch presumably sometime later this year.

April 22, 2011 - 9:00am
Drupal Voices
17:17 minutes (15.87 MB)
mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

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Comments

Khaled (not verified) on April 23, 2011 - 5:42am

I'd like really to see

I'd like really to see Pantheon news for developers, where are they now and how they'll solve the dev-stage-production problems, so we don't end up having so many solutions and wasting time repeating same problem solving. Also what's the difference between you and Acquia dev cloud? they also have some kind of dev-stage-production DragnDrop support.

Josh Koenig (not verified) on April 23, 2011 - 1:27pm

Best Practices: Yes!

I definitely agree about standardizing best practices. I think that's what we were able to do with the Mercury project, and we've been starting to do this a bit with Git here:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/140949

As Pantheon gets closer to public launch in the summer we'll likely be doing more and more public documentation of this sort. But to be totally honest, a lot of this is still under active development.

Now, I don't think we'll ever see "one true way" to do development, deployment or production hosting. That's part of the beauty of open source: there are usually two or three really good answers to any particular problem, and people are free to continue innovating.

However, we can certainly do a lot to eliminate wasted effort re-inventing the wheel. Also, we should be able to help people who want something that "just works" get up and running quickly so they can focus on the "what" of their project features/functionality instead of the "how" of project infrastructure.

Anonymous (not verified) on April 23, 2011 - 4:06pm

Tons of competition

There is tons of competition in this market, which has and continues to drive the price down; as Drupal gets easier to deploy you can expect to see more competition... Git will definitely make things much easier and D7 has already done tons to make scaling Drupal much, much easier.

I also think a proprietary stack that you can't easily move is a bad idea, especially when the product has not been well tested. Who knows when you tire of the existing company, and decide to switch to someone else. The beauty of open source is that you should be able to do that, take that away and it's not very far from any other proprietary solution.

Here are two other solutions that support developers :
http://WebEnabled.com
http://acquia.com/products-services/dev-cloud

I have generally noticed the big guys don't usually depend on third party managed hosting from a small(er) company; usually opting to deploy it on either Amazon or Rackspace or their own stack in-house.

As Amazon is a billion dollar company that still has significant problems, I can't really see how a small company could really compete or innovate in this space. It keeps a lot to keep these system going strong with something like 99% uptime, especially in terms of scalability and that can't really be abstracted away reliably yet, or at least that's what's been shown from Amazon's experience.

It's annoying to get started with the DIY approach, and perhaps there can be some innovation there; but you do need to have the whole gamut of knowledge if you are going to be admin'ing the systems and need maximum uptime.

You also need to be in control of the system, and pay for someone to look after it or else the cloud goes down takes down 100s of websites, and it takes days to get it back up for the small support team. Seen it happen with Amazon and before with other hosts, and they've got the budget.

All I can say is best of luck... if it were me I wouldn't be in this business.

Wes (not verified) on April 26, 2011 - 2:41pm

Josh's enthusiasm is

Josh's enthusiasm is contagious. This could end up being really cool.

Of course I'm skeptical about some of these startups as well, but the sheer energy behind them is mind-blowing. Pantheon and Commerce Guys are two examples of startups that I'm really excited about.

It just seems that there's a surge of energy, momentum, and capital in the Drupal world that is unbelievable. It makes me proud to be a part of this community!