Blog

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).

amazee.io is a fully remote, global team, building the world's fastest-growing Open Source Hosting environment. With flexible working hours and worldwide remote distribution from Auckland, Zürich, and on to California, what’s it like to work for amazee.io?

Lagoon has rolled out functionality to enable a blue-green deployment strategy for our hosted sites, which we are calling Active/Standby. In this webinar, we will explain how to enable a site for Active/Standby, explain what the differences are between the environments, and run through the process of promoting a Standby site to Active.

Active/Standby deployments, also known as blue/green deployments, are a way to seamlessly switch over your production content. Your active (or green) environment is your current active production environment. Your standby (or blue) environment is your standby environment, where you have changes staged that are ready to roll out. The environments are otherwise identical, so the go-live is just a flip of a switch. All incoming traffic is now routed to your new active environment, and the previous active environment takes the standby position. 

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 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.

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.