Getting Started with a Real World Application on platform.sh

This is the second in a series of articles involving the writing and launching of my DurableDrupal Lean ebook series website on platform.sh. Since it’s a real world application, this article is for real world website and web application developers. If you are starting from scratch but enthusiastic and willing to learn, that means you too. I’m fortunate enough to have their sponsorship and full technical support, so everything in the article has been tested out on the platform. A link will be edited in here as soon as it goes live.

Diving in

Diving right in I setup a Trello Kanban Board for Project Inception as follows:

Project Inception Kanban

Both Vision (Process, Product) and Candidate Architecture (Process, Product) jobs have been completed, and have been moved to the MVP 1 column. We know what we want to do, and we’re doing it with Drupal 7, based on some initial configuration as a starting point (expressed both as an install profile and a drush configuration script). At this point there are three jobs in the To Do column, constituting the remaining preparation for the Team Product Kickoff. And two of them (setup for continuous integration and continuous delivery) are about to be made much easier by virtue of using platform.sh, not only as a home for the production instance, but as a central point of organization for the entire development and deployment process.

Beginning Continuous Integration Workflow

What we’ll be doing in this article:

Five Things I didn’t know about Platform.sh

I want to share some exciting things I’m only just finding out about Platform.sh (the “Develop, Deploy, Rinse, Repeat” continuous delivery cloud platform for Drupal, Symfony and PHP based projects) that look as if they might have a lot to do with folks finding a straightforward way of enabling a truly Lean process applied to website and web application projects. We’ll cover five things I didn’t know about Platform.sh:

  1. The Standard Platform Workflow is just what modern, serious PHP, Symfony and Drupal developers might expect and can easily be set up for all team members.

  2. The Standard Platform Architecture is container based and scales tremendously well for most use cases.

  3. They don’t use Varnish! They use CDNs (content delivery networks)!

  4. There’s an Enterprise Platform with its own truly scalable architecture and unique benefits

  5. A chance to get a first-hand report from someone actually using the Platform.sh Enterprise Platform.