Case study: when 'totally wrong’ goes exactly right

The newly launched Q-music sites are built upon Drupal 7 and feature a rich user experience. The complexity of the Drupal installation, combined with many custom made modules, might seem a daunting task to get everything fast, while using a minimum set of resources. The website of a radio station is supposed to be dynamic and ever-changing. So the external API's, to get artist and record data, traffic info, weather updates and more, should be combined with the Drupal installation and the internal systems which update the site when the DJ presses ‘play’ in the studio,… When users like songs or DJ's, comment in the chatboxes, or interact in other ways, the site will reflect their actions instantly.

Does this complex set-up also sounds like an major challenge to you? If this feels like instant fun, than we can tell you all about the use of memcached and varnish (ESI, banning, custom hashing), explain you how you can easily shoot yourself in the foot with a DDOS, why we cache personalized pages, when Drupal is faster than caching, when Redis isn't living up to the promises it made, and how you handle over 150.000 node.js connections with a single virtual machine.

This is a true DevOps project, with good collaboration between both teams. As an Ops guy, and armed with graphs, hardware specs, kernel parameters, devs-writing-custom-modules, curl-commands and N+1 situations, I’ll explain the various iterations the set-up and codebase went through and detail the observations made and lessons learned. Both "doh!" and "aha" moments will be included.