Website maintenance is a common challenge, especially for agencies running dozens or even hundreds of sites. Platform.sh uses an internally-developed feature, Source Operations, to effectively manage its “fleets” of web applications.
Defining a fleet
Augustin Delaporte, Director of Enterprise and Fleets at Platform.sh, defines a fleet like this.“As soon as you start having more than one web application that you're managing, you’re running a fleet, basically. You're facing constraints, you're facing different programmatics that you have to solve, like how you maintain, upgrade, and implement new features to those applications.”
The need for Source Operations
Chris Yates, our other guest, makes the case that scaling is three-dimensional. And as he says, “The third dimension of scale is people.” When you scale up to a “fleet,” your DevOps team can quickly become overwhelmed with the various tasks of maintaining that fleet.
As Chris explains, “The more people and the more organization structures you involve, the more complexity you get in terms of how you manage your fleet. Being able to coordinate responsibility for those who are actually actively maintaining an individual site is a challenge.”
Managing a fleet
Our guests say it doesn’t take that long to gather enough applications to be called a “fleet”—as few as five will do. Platform.sh’s Source Operations feature helps manage fleets by automating site maintenance, ensuring the web applications are secure, up-to-date, and appropriately customized for each instance.
Augustin explains how Source Operations works. “First of all, the workflow that we are running is Git-based. So if you want to update a specific code base on a project, you will have to use Git. And we map the entire architecture of your application, including the services and everything else in Git. So you define the different services with their version and their configuration, and you use Git to deploy and upgrade your site. When you start having a lot of projects, you need a mechanism to update them all at once, with the guarantee that what you're deploying can be tested and checked before it actually goes to production. And that's the entire idea of Source Operations.”
Maintenance, security, package upgrades, deployments, feature implementation, and user-facing content is a lot to handle, even for an experienced DevOps team. With Source Operations, you can automate with confidence.
View the Platform.sh Source Operations documentation.
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