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As everybody knows, Drupal 9 is just around the corner. As a hosting provider, we need to be able to make sure that our customers who wish to utilize Drupal 9 can do so. The release comes with a few environment requirements that we need to make sure we can handle, and adds a few more behind-the-scenes actions we needed to prepare ourselves.

The main reason for this release is to ensure that our images and infrastructure are ready to support Drupal 9 on release day. We’ll also be releasing a blog post outlining what we’ve put in place.

As the interest in containerization continues to grow, so does the number of options to facilitate it. Kubernetes has not only become the industry standard to maintain, start, and deploy containers, but a broad open-source ecosystem has also been built around it. It can be challenging to navigate the growing set of possibilities. If your organization is considering a more hands-on, DIY approach to migrating to Kubernetes, we’ve laid out some key considerations for you.

As we start discussing what Lagoon 2.0 might look like, we’ve been working hard on our roadmap. In addition, - the updates we need to support Drupal 9 will hopefully be coming in the next couple of weeks. We’ve identified that the version of MariaDB (10.2.31) included in all Lagoon releases to 1.5.0 does not meet the minimum standard for Drupal 9 (10.3.7) – so we will be upgrading it to version 10.4.13, as per Alpine 3.11, as well as introducing example projects and tests for D9. Stay tuned!

After ten years as a back-end developer, Alanna decided a change was in order. Still carrying a torch for Drupal, content management systems, and helping others, she is now working as a documentation writer, trainer, and developer advocate at amazee.io. Alanna also serves as a track chair for DrupalCon North America, is on the leadership team of Drupal Diversity and Inclusion, and serves the Drupal Community Working Group as an ambassador to Drupal Diversity and Inclusion.

In our recent blog post Michael outlined why amazee.io is working so hard to make Lagoon work in managed Kubernetes. The benefits of better autoscaling and reduced maintenance obviously are the headline grabbers, but today we want to discuss one of the most important benefits to amazee.io and our customers: portability.

Hailing from the Isle of Man, and having lived in Canberra, Australia for the last 18 years, Toby has had a wide and diverse career, mostly technology focussed, but with a few interesting tangents (ask him about them sometime!). He’s a long-time map, data and open source nerd, and he’s happiest talking to people about the tech he’s passionate about.

When we started building Lagoon four years ago, best practices for containerized hosting were still being developed, and building everything based on OpenShift was an obvious choice, as it provided an enterprise-class solution. As the cloud-native landscape has grown, native Kubernetes has not only become the industry standard to maintain, start, and deploy containers, but a broad open-source ecosystem has been built around it, and now provides a lot of the tools and features that were previously only available in Openshift. 

Driven by a global pandemic, the world is changing at a rapid pace which requires all of us to adapt, reassess and rethink our daily lives. We are adapting our private lives (eg. taking care of and educating our children while schools and daycare are closed, leveraging modern online technology to connect more frequently with family members and friends) and adapting our professional life as most companies have switched to working from home.

As foreshadowed in the Lagoon 2020 roadmap, native Kubernetes support was always going to feature large in the first half of this year – we got a large portion of the work done in our Austin sprint and this is the release of that (and some follow-up) work. Rest assured that we’re still working on features and fixes for the Openshift components (the two can exist side-by-side quite happily for now). As we develop new features, we will take into consideration compatibility with both platforms.

With Lagoon Version 2 now in beta testing and its release on the horizon, we hosted a webinar to highlight Lagoon Version 2’s biggest and most exciting new feature: the capability to deploy into Native Kubernetes clusters.

We’re delighted to announce Franz Karlsberger as CEO - he will take up the amazee.io reins on April 1st, sharing management responsibilities with Michael Schmid and Thom Toogood, and supported by Dania Gerhardt for financial planning.

In the spirit of International Women’s History Month, we wanted to hear from one of our own female role models in the tech field; Dania Gerhardt, Co-founder of amazee.io and Chief Financial Officer of Amazee Group. For years, she has successfully supported not only amazee.io but the entire Amazee Group, and she stands as an example to all those who are looking to also one day become a leader in the field. So we sat down with Dania and asked about her own experience being a #WomaninTech. Here’s what she had to say

Until now, Lagoon users have been reliant on a suite of local dev tools, including our own homespun open source tool, Pygmy. As amazee.io’s primary focus is developing and supporting the Lagoon hosting platform, maintaining and enhancing Pygmy has often been less of a priority. Because of this, the local development process has always had room for improvement.

Lagoon Version 2 is in beta testing now and its release is on the horizon. Version 2’s biggest and most exciting new feature will be the capability to deploy into native Kubernetes clusters.

Lagoon 1.3.0 will be released soon! Changes will include improvements to our testing setup and some necessary image updates and removals foreshadowed in Lagoon 1.2.0.

Working with contribution-focused clients allows us to contribute work we do to help the community at large. A few months back, we got the chance to contribute on an issue to GitLab, helping any Lagoon users who use it for their repos. Our RBAC system allows users and companies to assign roles with different permissions via our API.

We gathered team members from all over the world for a week of intense coding, fondue, and fun in Austin, TX as we sprinted to deploy Lagoon into Kubernetes and kick-off 2020. At amazee.io, we don’t believe in having a fixed engineering team and support team because we know that having the same people build and support our hosting platform means a higher level of fast and expert support for our clients.

When we started building Lagoon, best practices for containerized hosting were still being developed, and building everything based on OpenShift was an obvious choice, as it provided an enterprise-class solution.

amazee.io is excited to announce our new Project Manager — Nicole Ritchie.