The Drupal service moves to the CERN Cloud, inspired by modern industry standards
All sites will be moved to this new Cloud infrastructure early October. We expect this move to be transparent.
This brings exciting new possibilities for Drupal site admins, such as:
integration with the new CERN SSO
multiple “environments” to test and preview your changes
we will also create a Drupal 9 preview of your site to help you prepare
security and customizability, enabling technical collaborations/contractors
an (upcoming) modern management UI to replace cern.ch/web
We will gradually consolidate documentation here in drupal-community as the features are being released.
Changes
Website management will be done in new way, due to the simultaneous revamp of the Drupal infrastructure and the Webservices portal.
This is a list of areas/actions that will in some way change. Details on the changes will follow soon.
SSO - authorization
New webservices portal
Site creation/deletion
Aliases
Cloning
On-demand backups
Access to website logs
Drush access possible, but instructions under development
Installing local modules
Web client for DB access (phpMyAdmin)
Webanalytics
Interim support through Service-Now
During the commissioning of the Cloud infrastructure many workflows that Drupal admins are used to launching from the /_site URL (cloning, on-demand backup/restore) will be performed through service-now tickets.
This is a temporary situation, until all functionality is commissioned.
Communication channels
We’ll keep all communication here on Discourse.
To ask questions or support, please write in the category #move-to-saas
You can also use our Mattermost channel
We will NOT be monitoring the email address drupal-admins@cern.ch (please don’t use it).
You are invited to enroll today by responding to this thread.
This will give you a chance for quicker help, since the Infrastructure team will focus on your sites
You will have more time to preview Drupal 9 versions of your websites and ensure they are ready, before Drupal 8 is phased out in November 2021
What this means for you
You will in principle not have to make any change to your site.
There will only be changes in:
the authorization rules
the functionality available in the /_site management application and the webservices portal (cern.ch/web)
As a highlight, backup & restore will be done in a different manner, and we will release documentation soon.
Procedure
Once you enroll, we will move official sites that you own to the Cloud infrastructure.
This is what we will do:
We will clone your website and create a preview (new website), accessible at <mysite>.webtest.cern.ch, which you can verify. You will receive an email notification.
If there is any issue during this period, please notify us and we can stop the move.
5 days later, we will clone again (any changes in the preview will be lost) and this time will replace your original site at <mysite>.web.cern.ch.
There is also a possibility to roll back the changes on <mysite>.web.cern.ch. In such a case, any changes to the site since the move will be lost (similar to restoring a backup).
Only official sites
When you enroll, we will only migrate by default the official sites that you own.
If you’d like a test site to be moved as well, or a site that you manage, please note it in your enrolment comment.
Non-standard authentication rules need manual action
Some websites with non-standard authentication rules might need manual changes to translate those rules to the new CERN SSO
