 Good to go. Everybody hear me all right? Cool welcome welcome to our session Sierra Club case study. It's how Drupal and Black Mesh help us save the planet My name is Ron Johnson. I work with Black Mesh. I have been working with the company since 2011 Been in the host industry about 14 years now mainly as a systems network guy Got into Drupal when I started with Black Mesh loved a lot met these guys. This is Jesse Brown here. He's been with Sierra Club since 2014 started Drupal when he started with Sierra Club and Prior to the club. He has built and ran his own sites Next to him on the left is Adrian. He's been with Sierra Club since 02 He's been doing web development since 96 and working in Drupal since 2011 a little bit about a little bit about Black Mesh and how we work at a high level Most of y'all probably seen us around Drupal shows and whatnot. We are a Managed services and cloud solutions provider. We were founded in 2003. We focus on Drupal But that's not all we do so we do lots of other fun things as well Our headquarters out in Ashburn, Virginia where most of our guys are we have other offices out in Vegas and other locations We are again a solutions provider. We're a security focused company So we have we handle lots of compliance hosting specifically PCI HIPAA as well as Fed ramp and things of that nature Another little fact we own a hundred percent of our network and hardware and the tier four data centers we leverage So we have various open-stack public and private clouds. We do physical boxes firewalls. You name it Point being we are not leveraged another provider. It's our network our platform How do y'all how many people know who the Sierra Club is? Does anyone not know who the Sierra Club is? All right, cool. Is there any members in the audience? Thank you all for your support. I really we really appreciate it So we've been on Drupal since 2011 and We were originally hosted on Windows machines for for various reasons which I'll get into a little bit more and You know the Sierra Club we do we do a lot of different things Both as a national organization and as a local organization, so we're a big messy organization So as you expect our sites are kind of big and messy as well And so we have you know our main website which also includes our magazine and some of our chapters And then we have individual chapter sites and then some sites for various specialty campaigns that we have around So we really We had a we had a moment last year where we were moving offices We moved from San Francisco to Oakland and we took it as a as a moment to like look at our servers and really decide if we wanted to stick with Windows and You know just looking at Drupal on a Windows. It's it has some obvious challenges There's just lots of little quirky things about file paths and stuff that that made for weird bugs That's we spent a lot of time trying to troubleshoot and Another another big thing is like there was no like there was no set of tools that were really out there used by the Drupal community that We could just like climb on and take on as our own and help us with our flow and stuff So we ended up like create in our own processes which we had to maintain So it was always always always challenges there. So yeah, so we did like our own homegrown tools And I'll let Jesse talk about some of our other things we were thinking about as Hi So Yeah, we have I guess our structure internally in the Sierra Club is kind of small and pretty lean As far as developers that work with Drupal go Until about a week ago Adrienne and I were a hundred percent of that team and now we have like a third guy Which we're pretty stoked about And then we had like an internal it support team as well And I guess those guys were familiar with windows in their domain But they didn't really know anything about Drupal and I didn't know anything about Drupal either when I was hired by the club I was like, I love the club. I'll learn it cool. I want to help And so Yeah, I don't know like said like Adrienne said it was kind of always a bit frustrating to be like Well, we have this problem and we could use this open-source library, but it doesn't run on windows IAS so it was good for us to get the opportunity to get away from there And yeah, I don't know we were always kind of Wishing we had more support I guess so moving to a lamp stack was really helpful for us and moving to Black mesh which which obviously has the expertise and the support infrastructure was was pretty helpful We had a bunch of challenges with Configuration and migration we had I think at the time when we were about to switch over we had 75 plus sites in a big sprawling Multi-site doc route and we paired that back to about 45 Which was a good start We're trying to reduce that number still but it is how it is We didn't really have anything like varnish before in our stack So adding that in has been really cool, but obviously it brings its own challenges as well And we needed our provider to work with with our own CDN we're using capsular And I don't know there's been a bunch of configuration challenges to solve And we had to consider whether we wanted to keep multi-site or like split them all up into 45 different repositories and all of that so we had a bunch of decisions to wade through which was You know, definitely a bit of a head trip And I guess when we were looking for providers That kind of got like to go through and sift through all of the different options kind of came to me So we considered a whole bunch of different things and I guess internally we had a lot of different opinions to manage and and priorities, but The big picture stuff that it came down to was that we wanted to be on an open-source stack We wanted to get away from proprietary stuff I personally was pretty Interested in going with someone who had their own infrastructure and wasn't just like buying Inventory from AWS and marking it up or whatever not that there's anything wrong with that But I kind of really wanted people who knew their own system and knew their own stack really well Probably because of my background of just trying to figure everything out myself Which is I don't know it is what it is we wanted people who are Drupal experience obviously, but we also it to me Personally, it was also appealing to work with someone who also had experience beyond Drupal because Drupal can be pretty Drupal-specific And and support was a big deal for us because let's face it. We're a small team and we don't know what we're doing We really don't so we need help So support was one of the things I really looked at and and considered pretty seriously and Yeah, I think we've ended up in a pretty good place It's it's definitely been a lot of work to transition them over and there was like there's been a like a lot of bugs but they're pretty much all been fixed as they've come up which has been pretty great and I think you couldn't like take what we had off windows and put it on lamp and not to expect to have like issues come up So it's been it's been a good process And and we I don't know when did we do as March last year? I think I Think I don't know March April May. I don't know sometime in the first or second quarter last year we've been on the on black mesh for a while now and Yeah, I first came across them I guess at a Drupal con in Austin and I was at their booth because they had beer that year Which was great. I noticed no beer this year run Well, we'll see you next year But yeah, I don't know I was just there and I talked to someone in the line and you know They come and scan your badge and have a quick chat about it. Whatever you're doing or whatever and that was nice and And a year later in LA the same guy came back and recognized me and asked me follow-up questions from the conversation a year ago Which and they had beer that year too Which was great And anyway, like it maybe a year after that or six months after that we kind of seriously started Looking at all of our options and and this is this is where we've landed And it comes we bought the dev ops tool as well cascade black mesh has a dev ops tool which has definitely made our life easier Some of the issues we've had I guess have been around Like the the custom process that we had that Adrian was talking about before was largely to manage our updates And that was running in PowerShell and Windows and it was Somewhat brittle and it worked kind of okay, but I never really knew any of the windows like operating system stuff So when it broke I just didn't really know What to do about it and now we run all that stuff on Jenkins using drush, which is definitely like It's probably taken a two hour a week task to about a 15 20 I don't know maybe 30 minute tasks sometimes so it's been there've been a lot of benefits for us for sure We've got some really sweet monitoring set up with their platform a lot of automated alerts We've got you know, just normal alerts that check for strings at the bottom of all of our sites And if they're not there they fire an alert and we've got some other kind of stuff that we try We run like automated checks on our dev and staging environments for you know The odd module out there in the contrib land that will suddenly stop rendering images and give you a text string instead We have automated alerts that fire if if that occurs and so we try and catch that stuff on dev and stage now Which is really nice We still totally eyeball stuff in the browser as part of our process But we have at least some of the more notorious stuff Automated so we got a long way to go I think in terms of our own internal DevOps process But we've come a long way on the platform that we're on which has been really nice And we've been able to integrate some custom rules with varnish. So like certain Certain pages on certain sites were able to exclude from caching or set really like granular caching limits If we have specific needs for some pages to be updated like every two minutes or rather than every 15 compared to others So a lot of flexibility has come with it and a lot of support which has been really great because It's definitely been times where we really need the help with a small team So yeah, that's kind of part of our story Appreciate that Jesse Gonna talk a bit about the solution how it works with these guys are running on the server side And we'll open up the questions at the end if there are any so We have Sierra Club obviously is their front-facing site needs to be a you know face of the company kind of thing So we have an HA solution we you know lose a server. We're gonna keep the site online As Jesse was mentioned the support we wrap unlimited 24 7365 technical support and monitoring around the site and all the services It's obviously tuned for Drupal with some of these components here in the image like varnish op-cache memcache typical Performance tuning tools that you guys have heard a thousand times But we will work with to Sierra Club tune them specific to the site and you know as Jesse was mentioned They have some custom requirements there We also assisted with the migration did all the heavy lifting pulling the the site off their platform Internally and get it on black mesh and working with them to test it and then we kind of tied everything together with our Cascade tool that essentially there's another slide on it, but it's essentially a web interface that integrates with get Jenkins few other things on the back end and You know, let's just go to that slide So here's a quick screenshot of it's gonna allow you to Essentially move code in between development staging live environments. You can copy databases You can restart services your web services varnish Things of that nature you can set up users groups different levels of permissions If you only want certain folks running or working on certain sites things of that nature and then if Anybody falls outside of like this cascade solution here. We can we create it in-house. So we are able to make modifications to that depending on what the needs are So all in all, I mean our experience with black mesh has been pretty awesome. I mean, I think the just just from a support perspective of Generally when we submit a ticket we hear back within within often within an hour if not just if not sooner and you know Sometimes a little longer, but not often and you know, it's not that they always know the answer right away And sometimes you have to work work You have to know what to ask to get to the answer But it's been really great being able to rely on that in a really really big way You know, I don't think we did like any particular benchmarking, but like The traffic after the election is as you might expect like really hit hit all of our pages really hard and Our dot or our regular website our main website didn't even blink Some of our other services off of Salesforce actually did So I think that's a good testament You know, I think they've also helped us do a bunch of planning they've helped with Jenkins to get our as Jesse was talking about to get our update process working We're talking to them about Get doing HTTPS everywhere. They helped us get a composer Repository working and troubleshooting some stuff around that And then, you know, so our internal IT folk they have plenty of other things to do So we freed up a lot of time for them with this with this solution. So it's been awesome So just a just a final final bit my dad always tells the story he's a he's an he's an engineer He's a mechanical engineer worked for four at a long time and he always quotes this guy Dr. Demi and there's no substitute for knowledge And so there's two things to that one is like, you know, blackfish, they know certain things like they don't they're not They're not gonna solve all your Drupal problems. They're gonna solve certain certain aspects of that So you're you're still you're still in charge of like making your code work of Making the decisions about choosing between options They can help you get between options and do a lot for you But like ultimately you still gotta like you still gotta figure it out So It's not that you can be a total noob and use black mesh and hope that everything's just gonna work Right like you have to you do have to learn that step So like just knowing knowing the good questions to ask both of support and of yourself like it's it's hard work But it's for us. It's been it's been really awesome with black mesh Getting to those to the right answers. So Thank you for your time. We have a couple minute questions. Yeah We have a few minutes for any questions. Should anybody have any please speak up Or see us afterwards and I had a question about sort of I know you guys have different chapter sites And I'm just wondering about what the rollout looks like for those Do you need to have to coordinate every time or you want to multi-site? Like how is that working with many different sites? Sure. We originally we originally were building individual sites in a multi-site for them but We eventually gave that up as a model because it was it was a little too hard for our chapter volunteers to really to really get into that So currently we have an organic group system within our main site, which is which is working really well People seem to be happy with it multi-part question Your windows infrastructure that you migrated from was that an internal infrastructure or was that cloud-based? It was internal internal so were there any webs at the at the completion of the migration was there any Web services or any services that you had to keep internal or you were you able to migrate everything to the cloud? We have we have a we still actually have a few things running on a Windows server Okay, some content. We decided we didn't we didn't have the capacity to migrate Okay, and a couple website that we're sort of waiting for other solutions that still haven't happened yet Okay, and final final question if you had any advice to give to an organization considering a cloud migration What would it be? lots of planning Okay, yeah, I I guess having led our project of finding a vendor my advice would be like To really clarify what's gonna be the most important to you once you're on the cloud Infrastructure and what okay sort of services and what you want your experience to be like if you need to communicate with that vendor, okay like Because there are like all of the options in between You could look at something like rack space where they provide awesome system admin support and no application level support at all Right, or you could look at someone that'll have like really High-level like application level support, but they'll charge you per support ticket. All right And so if supports a big deal for you I'd really like ask a lot of questions from all the vendors about exactly what their support system looks like All right, I mean I know for us. We've opened a couple of hundred tickets with these guys And if we'd been with other vendors, we wouldn't have been able to open that many because it wouldn't have been financially viable So that was one of the things that I really looked at in a lot of detail is what the support offerings were like All right And I'd also ask them like where they're getting their service space from like is it theirs or are they getting it from somewhere? If they're getting it somewhere else What are they offering as a software layer on top of that and how's that going to aid your workflow? All right, I think workflow is the other stuff. We looked at really carefully like you know, and they're automated processes to deploy code from like From different environments between dev and staging or just pull a DB down from pride and just injected into you Really easily like though. I think the support in the workflow We're two of the biggest issues for us. I think that we looked in and I think once we realized that those were really important to us Well, you had a long list of questions man We spent like hours on the phone with these guys and others as well like just really taking the time to understand Each offering because they all have pros and cons right and I would just give that discovery a lot of time And like Adrian said a lot of planning Well, thank you guys is a great presentation This is a question for black meshed you guys You talked about a dev stage prod as a process. Do you also have the capability of like Spinning up some sandboxes for other types of testing that are not gonna go through that process Yeah, whatever you need. I mean, so that's the typical setup dev stage lie But you know, we have other clients that have other requirements. Maybe they have multiple dev environments multiple staging they have Test boxes utility boxes, whatever so I mean when it comes down to it We're a solutions provider and whatever you need we can typically meet a hundred percent of requirements. So it's it's no issue Thanks, you're welcome. Thank you Hi also for black mesh Just started building a site with you guys and I didn't come across the cascade thing Is that to all your customers get no no you so with us I mean cascade is available, but with our flexibility We don't force you to use the tool so you can come in and you can have us install whatever tools you would require You know drush get whatever else it may be or you can use a cascade tool So let's let's have a conversation offline after this if you don't mind and we can chat about it Can you put that slide up again? Yeah, actually, I'll send you a URL that gives you like a five-minute demo a live demo on the site We'll take a look at that Thank you. Yeah, sure. Yeah, we should be Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for your time everyone. Thank you Nobody check this