Enhanced Security, Zero Downtime: Modernizing Sandoz's Global Drupal Hosting Platform
When Sandoz, a global pharmaceutical leader, needed to modernize their vast digital ecosystem, they faced a daunting challenge: migrating over 180 complex, decoupled Drupal sites from a restrictive legacy hosting provider. This transition was complicated by a severely limited internal time capacity, no direct access to the legacy infrastructure, and the need to preserve thousands of path-based redirects across hundreds of domains. The mandate was clear: achieve enhanced security, deliver improved performance, and drastically reduce operational complexity, all while ensuring minimal disruption. This case study details how amazee.io tackled these unique constraints, treating the migration not just as a transfer, but as a complete architectural transformation.
This project showcases the power of our fully managed, automation-first approach. We leveraged Ansible, AWX, and our open source hosting architecture to build a repeatable, scalable, and secure deployment pipeline, pioneering a base image strategy that delivered sub-minute deployment times across the entire 180+ site portfolio. You'll learn the custom technical workarounds we engineered, from securely handling content transfer without legacy access to building a single Node.js frontend capable of routing traffic to over 180 individual Drupal backends.
Read the Sandoz case study and discover:
- How automation, powered by Ansible and AWX, enabled the fully managed, batched migration of 180+ decoupled Drupal sites with minimal client involvement.
- The base image strategy that dramatically cut deployment times across the entire platform, achieving sub-minute release cycles.
- The custom technical workaround used to securely transfer code and content when direct access to the legacy hosting platform was unavailable.
- How a single Node.js frontend was architected on Kubernetes (EKS) to seamlessly route traffic to over 180 individual Drupal backends.
- The strategy for replacing dozens of fragmented security zones with a single, centralized Managed CDN and Advanced WAF system for consistent protection.
- Detailed insights into the phased, repeatable go-live process, including canary deployments and real-time observability protocols.
- How adopting our managed Drupal hosting platform empowered Sandoz's developers with flexibility, faster workflows, and efficient rollback capabilities.