Building the next generation of GovCMS with Salsa Digital

We couldn’t be more excited to announce that amazee.io, through a partnership with Salsa Digital, has signed a three-year contract with the Australian Department of Finance to build the next evolution of GovCMS, the Drupal-based content management system used by the Australian Government. Existing sites on GovCMS, as well as new government agencies on-boarding, will benefit from our a fully open source and container based hosting platform.

A Match Made in Open Source

amazee.io and Salsa Digital share the values of open source and transparency and that’s just one of the reasons we love working with them! We’ve collaborated before on the Victoria SDP project. SDP was launched last week by Victoria’s Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC). SDP and it uses the same stack — Drupal coupled with Lagoon.

When the GovCMS opportunity was presented, we knew we could offer an unparalleled and open source solution that would meet their needs and support their values.

A Modern Hosting solution based on Lagoon

Together we will be providing GovCMS with a modern hosting solution based on Lagoon. Lagoon is everything you’ve come to expect from Docker in a Drupal-friendly environment. It is made up of a system of microservices that take code, create Docker Images, push the images into OpenShift/Kubernetes, and monitor deployments.

Lagoon allows developers to develop locally with Docker, with the exact same Docker images and Containers running in production in Kubernetes. This eliminates all of the hassle that comes with different versions or configurations. If it runs locally, it will run in production.

The Importance of Open Source

In addition to all of features already in Lagoon, we will be working to develop new features and custom solutions. We’re already talking about developing more self service for developers through APIs, CLIs and UI, better integration into Git hosting, and more insights into the containers through reporting.

Not only will this be of great benefit to GovCMS, we will be contributing back everything we build to the Lagoon project and the open source community. In a day full of great news, that might be the greatest news of all.

The decision to use Lagoon, coming from the Australian Department of Finance, clearly shows the need for open source platforms in the hosting market. Open source has been at the heart of all we do, and amazee.io was built on the idea that hosting should no longer be the one place in web development where open source solutions weren’t available. This is an incredible day for open source and we are excited to be a part of it.

Read more in the joint Media Release of amazee.io and Salsa Digital.