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Now that 2008 has officially arrived, we are eagerly pulling all our existing sites consolidated onto our platform infrastructure, freeing ourselves from (some of) the nightmares of ongoing maintenance and security updates, while we ramp up some new development projects for this year.
Meantime, I've been having some interesting conversations with others in the local drupal community, and eagerly watching the latest developments from a couple of projects related to the Anarres Drupal Platform: AutoPilot and HostMaster 2.
Let me start with a very abbreviated history of mass-hosted Drupal:
In the beginning, there was Drupal. Then there was Bryght, which was the first company to offer a hosted Drupal service. This was based on a "closed" set of scripts, tools, and PostgreSQL database management which allowed Bryght to quickly and easily deploy as many Drupal sites as they liked.
In turn, Bryght contributed much of their efforts back to the community, enabling much of the current multi-site capability that now ships standard with Drupal core. At some point, Bryght consolidated their management tools into a package, called HostMaster, and released it to the community.
This was awesome, and while we never actually set it up (mainly due to legacy issues, lack of docs, inexperience with PostgreSQL, etc), I had many helpful discussions with the folks at Bryght about how this worked and what stumbling blocks they had hurdled. At Anarres, we had just begun to see the complexities we faced as our installed base of Drupal sites grew.
Around the same time, I began working closely with Jason Diceman on the Ashoka-Dev project. This was an effort to consolidate most of Ashoka's web presence onto a single, multi-site Drupal installation. Over the course of the next year or so, I helped Jason coordinate a small team of developers, building out much of the infrastructure we needed to manage parallel development and working out an effective process for rolling out changes to stage and live environments.
Since then, we have rapidly consolidated our learning around all this stuff, and put together our own Platform service. Much of the "front end" work is still in the works, but the architecture and infrastructure for this model of Drupal development is by now quite solid.
In the meantime, Adrian over at Bryght has been hard at work improving on his original efforts with HostMaster2, this time built in Drupal itself. Late last year, I watched excitedly as a thread unfolded in my inbox wherein Adrian announced a fresh release of the project on http://svn.bryght.com/hostmaster.
At the same time, the folks over at WorkHabit have been putting quite a lot of energy (and at least as much hype) into their contribution in this space: AutoPilot.
AutoPilot's focus is more closely tied to the development work we've been doing internally and with Ashoka. The critical issue with developing and maintaining lots of Drupal sites is change management.
Over the last year, WorkHabit has made several announcements about their project (creating appropriate levels of hype and excitement amongst the Drupal developer community), and most recently stated they are nearly ready to release their "beta", following a heavy round of feedback/development following the DrupalCon in Barcelona.
All of this, along with a handful of related Drupal projects would seem to indicate that 2008 will be the year of the Drupal Platform. We're excited to explore and participate as this new era of Drupal site development unfolds!
One closing thought: recent conversations with a number of colleagues in the Toronto Drupal User's Group, it became clear to me that a real "value add" that Anarres can provide here is to make it easy for external developers to leverage the infrastructure we've built into the Anarres Platform so they don't have to build it themselves.
We've always planned to make this stuff available to "associates" of Anarres, but increasingly my focus is on making it relatively easy for us to give the Platform service to developers/implementors, which they would sell to their own clients. I'd be very interested in feedback and ideas for what would make this most useful and effective.