The platform now hosts two large portals alongside a number of testing and staging environments. Multi-Tenant HostingĪ key requirement of the agency was to host multiple sites on a single High Availability platform.
This dramatically reduces the manual maintenance required. We also took advantage of using Simple Storage Service for shared files, which avoids the complexity of managing ever-growing disks and storage constraints. Setting this up in Multi-Availability Zone mode meant that not only are there no issues when a database instance goes down, but ongoing maintenance and updates are handled automatically. In order to provide a High Availability architecture, in Skipper we moved the MySQL database to a hosted Relational Database Service. Skipper leverages the best of contemporary cloud services on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure infrastructure, PreviousNext’s cloud infrastructure partners. In early 2016 PreviousNext took over full responsibility for managing the client’s complex cloud services and used it as an opportunity to launch a next-generation cloud hosting platform we’re calling “Skipper”. This mean that any infrastructure upgrades in response to growing visitor traffic required manual intervention and its associated costs and time delays. The government agency had originally engaged a prominent global Drupal hosting company, who while using Amazon Web Services for their underlying infrastructure, couldn't take advantage of contemporary cloud services such as managed applications and true autoscaling.
As one of the most visited Drupal sites in Australia with more than 7 million page views per month, the agency was seeking higher performance and cost efficiency from their Drupal hosting provider. PreviousNext has worked closely with a large government agency on their public portal for the last few years.