Strategies for Managing a Fleet of Drupal Projects - DrupalGov, 2020

Running a fleet of Drupal projects presents a lot of challenges and problems to solve. Some things might fly for a handful of projects, but trying to scale that up will send you directly to the seventh circle of Drupal hell. Video

November 26, 2020

Can You Keep a Secret? - Bucharest, 2018

Slides Resources Check out my post from the original talk for the resources shown in this presentation. Photo credit: @technerdteitzel.

June 10, 2018

HashiCorp Vault for Drupalers

Securely managing application secrets can be challenging - especially in complex, multi-datacenter environments. Many common secret management tools and services only solve specific use cases, and are often coupled to specific cloud providers. HashiCorp Vault is an open-source secret management tool designed to support distributed applications and infrastructure as first-class citizens. It provides powerful features such as: Centralised secret storage Dynamic secrets Encryption as a Service Identity brokering Access control management Audit logging This session will introduce some important Vault concepts and operational considerations, before diving into a technical demonstration of the current Drupal integration capabilities....

June 8, 2018

Can You Keep a Secret? - Auckland, 2017

Every Drupal application has its secrets - and I don’t mean that dodgy code you wrote during an all-nighter. Database credentials, API keys, personally identifiable information - a secret is any data which could cause harm to your organisation if exposed. This session will introduce the concepts of secrets and secret management, before moving onto practical examples of securely storing secrets in Drupal. Video Unfortunately the recording doesn’t include the slides, see below if you would like to reference them....

November 16, 2017

Speaking at DrupalSouth 2017 in Auckland

I was lucky enough to have my topic Can You Keep a Secret? selected for DrupalSouth Auckland in November. In this presentation I will run through the basics of secret management, before diving into recipes for leveraging tools like HashiCorp Vault and AWS KMS in your Drupal projects. It is shaping up to be a great conference - there are a lot of really interesting talks scheduled, including 9 from my PreviousNext colleagues!...

October 19, 2017

Performance: Not an Afterthought

As Drupal continues to experience huge growth with government and enterprise clients, the scale and complexity of Drupal implementations also grows. A common issue affecting these bigger projects is poor website performance. Problems of this nature have huge and costly impacts on the customer; lost sales and advertising revenue, loss of consumer confidence and brand legitimacy, SEO penalties, increased hosting infrastructure costs - the list goes on. Not to mention the developers tasked with fixing the problem!...

April 12, 2015

Attending Drupal Down Under 2012!

In a little over a week Drupal Down Under 2012 will commence in Melbourne! I’m very excited to attend after the awesomeness of last year’s event in Brisbane. Planning my schedule was very difficult as there are so many great looking sessions! Huge kudos to Itomic for sponsoring my ticket. Unfortunately Itomic’s presence will be halved from last year; staff reshuffles, annual leave and the opening of our new office in the UK has left us a bit undermanned!...

June 1, 2012