Blog

We’re a fully-distributed company that lives and breathes open source. As a close-knit team, we collaborate with colleagues in every time-zone to build and maintain the world’s leading open-source hosting platform as well as provide managed services and expert support 24/7 to clients of all shapes and sizes.

As part of our commitment to supporting open government, we’re proud to attend and speak at Drupal GovCon again this year, where digital practitioners across the public sector will congregate to share learnings and best practices. Drupal GovCon 2020 is the largest event in the U.S. Government Drupal community.

Whilst the team has been hard at work on Lagoon 2, we’ve still found time to squeeze out a round of improvements, updates and bugfixes! We’ve also had to push out a quick 1.9.1 release to fix up a couple of unfortunate regressions – thank you so much to our customers and users for helping us to get to the bottom of the issues so quickly!

amazee.io’s CTO and Founder, Michael Schmid, and our Product Lead, Toby Bellwood recently participated in a discussion about Kubernetes and Drupal on Episode 257 of the podcast, Talking Drupal. Chatting with the hosts Stephen Cross, John Picozzi and Nic Laflin the conversation covered a lot of the history and intricacies of running Drupal on Kubernetes.

For governments, moving to the cloud and leveraging open source can offer significant advantages over proprietary, monolithic solutions. But there are also challenges to consider – everything from data sovereignty to choosing the right stack for your use cases. amazee.io is excited to host a panel of experts who will provide insights and clarity around how governments can successfully make the shift to cloud and open source.

Given that Silverstripe is built on PHP, supports Composer and has a similar configuration to Drupal, it has been relatively straightforward to implement Silverstripe CMS on the Lagoon platform. Silverstripe also supports Redis, Solr and Varnish to improve site performance and searchability.

Born in Catania Italy, Salvatore has lived in many towns in Italy and abroad, but now he’s based between Sicily and Rome — mostly. He is an open-minded person with a strong passion for technology and innovation in all its forms. With over ten years of experience in remote work, Salvatore likes to call himself a remote work evangelist. He’s a software developer with strengths on the backend and Ops. He’s also a tech lover, sci-fi reader, movie enthusiast, and TED talk addict.

The exceptional circumstances faced in 2020 have placed an unprecedented additional load on any websites that provide information on factors relating to, reporting on or assisting with the COVID-19 responses across the world. As the hosting provider for GovCMS, the Australian Government whole-of-government Drupal hosting platform, this has led to a large load on a number of websites hosted on the GovCMS platform, and on the amazee.io, Salsa Digital, GovCMS and individual agency web teams.

Previously, we discussed the general work culture at amazee.io. We discussed our approach to flexible work and our fully remote and unique culture. Now we are going to dive a bit deeper and introduce you to the people behind amazee.io. Today it’s the turn of two of our Systems Engineers – Thom and Bastian.

Born in Badulla, Sri Lanka, matured in Colombo, and now living in Melbourne, Australia, Chandana is a technical support engineer, learner, and problem solver. With a background in software and network systems support, Chandana works with systems engineers to support open source hosting solutions.

When Matterport replatformed their website on Drupal, they sought a hosting partner with the expertise and flexibility to meet their unique requirements. As the leading spatial data company, Matterport enables their customers to capture 3D images of physical spaces such as houses and buildings to provide interactive online tours and walkthroughs. With the global shift towards moving more and more customer experiences online, especially during COVID-19, demand for Mattterport’s services has never been greater and their website traffic has reflected this growth. With each peak in traffic and pageviews, amazee.io has been by Matterport’s side to ensure their website’s availability and performance remain maximal.

Due to the team’s focus on DrupalCon Global in the last couple of weeks, we’ve got a triple release to cover here (so apologies for being a little late!)

DrupalCon Global may have been virtual, but it wasn’t any less busy for amazee.io! We had a great week of learning, sharing, and (virtually) hanging out with other Drupalists from around the world. Here are some highlights. If you were at DrupalCon but missed these sessions, we’ve linked them to the session page or on-demand content library, which is only available to attendees. If you weren’t able to make it, we’ll update this post when the sessions are made available to the public later this summer!

amazee.io’s CTO and Founder, Michael Schmid, had the chance to discuss the origins of Lagoon and amazee.io on Episode 232 of the podcast, DrupalEasy. Chatting with Michael Anello, they delved into what it means to run a completely open-source platform, and how it fits into a best-practice focused Drupal development workflow.

amazee.io is hosting another Office Hours on July 21st. Register to join!

Back in our Lagoon 2020 Roadmap we discussed the work being undertaken to bring Lagoon to Kubernetes, and in Lagoon 1.4.0 (in April) we introduced the ability to run Lagoon workloads (projects/sites) on managed Kubernetes clusters. We’ve also variously discussed some of the aspects of what Lagoon 2.0 will bring; in our webinars, posts about managed Kubernetes, and even our migration process.

Mark your calendars! DrupalCon Global is just a few days away! July 14th - 17th, Drupal’s Open Source Digital Experience Conference promises to be a one-of-kind event, with everything you’d expect from any other DrupalCon with an expanded global audience and more!

In our recent webinar, Michael and Ben covered the “blue-green” functionality included in the recent Lagoon releases. We decided to call our implementation Active/Standby to avoid confusion and be more explicit about the action it performs.

Before joining amazee.io, I managed a Fortune 500 website with global traffic from B2B customers from household name brands. We were running a Drupal 7 site, which suffered inexplicable downtimes and latency.

1.7.0 brings the first release of the new Problems Database functionality, developed by our partners at Amazee Labs, along with the first couple of integrations. We’ll talk more shortly about the great potential for the Problems Database, but for now we’ve included the ability to collate Image vulnerability scans from Trivy (integrated with our Harbor install) and parse site audit and remediation activity generated by Drutiny).