Hosting Drupal on Openshift with the help of Lagoon – by Bastian Widmer (Amazee.io)

Amazee.io set out to make hosting of Drupal websites easier and more flexible. We always strive to stay at the cutting edge of technology. So it does not come to a surprise that we started adopting a container based approach to hosting. We’ll talk about what containers are and why we believe it’s important to go one step further and open source our technology we use to host websites.
 

How Does Hosting Without Containers Look Like?

First and foremost, it’s less flexible. If your project has special needs (i.e. caching with redis or a decoupled frontend with node.js)that your provider does not support, you might end up in a tricky situation.
You might have to either add another provider that supports your technology or you find another provider which hosts your project on one platform.
Adding another provider to the mix ads more complexity and less streamlined support structures if you ever run into issues. amazee.io’s new system, Lagoon, gives developers the flexibility to create their own service architecture, supporting everything from a simple Drupal website to a high traffic website with a decoupled frontend and server side rendering. We do this with through the magic of containers.
 

So, What are containers?

You can think about hosting companies as shipping companies and the servers we have are ships that hold the code from individual projects.
Before the standard shipping container existed it was quite an endeavour to load and unload a ships cargo because everything had custom dimensions – so stacking them in an efficient manner was really hard.As soon as a standard was established – in this case the shipping container – everything got much easier because they were stackable and had all the same form factor.
This allegory shows that the age of custom servers is over. Sure you can run a lot of things on a server but it will not scale past a certain degree. Containerizing your applications makes it much easier to move between platforms because you follow a certain standard.
You can see why hosting companies solve this by only hosting one kind of thing. Drupal sites, for example. But the beauty of containers is that we can host all sorts of projects and still make everything efficient and optimized for our ships. We do this with the help of container technology.
 

Open source

We’re entering the third decade of open source as the Open Source Initiative celebrated its 20th anniversary beginning of February 2018. From the very beginning, amazee.io was committed to  basing our work open source software and technologies as much as possible.  This enabled us to continue the great work started byother projects and bring innovative solutions a step further our solutions a step further.
Every version of our hosting system is more flexible than the last, with more  functionality for our clients. We always saw it a bit troubling that we host open source CMS like Drupal or WordPress on proprietary solutions where you don’t know what happens behind the curtains. ast year we decided to go one step further and we have open sourced our Docker in Production hosting System. It’s there for everyone to look at it, understand it, tinker with it. We welcome feedback, contributions, and high fives at all times.
You can find more about our Project on our Website or if you want to talk about hosting we’re always there for you on our Slack