DrupalCon North America 2021 Recap: The amazee.io Sessions

Another DrupalCon has come and gone! Can you believe it?

amazee.io was happy to sponsor DrupalCon North America this year but even happier to get to know new people in the Drupal community and catch up with old friends.

We hope you were able to check out the talks from our amazee.io speakers (and our intermission cooking lesson with Vincenzo; it was *chef’s kiss*) during the event, but if you missed our live sessions, we’ve put some highlights together below.

Drupal Security Management: More Than Robots Submitting PRs

In his talk, Blaize Kaye, Developer Experience Engineer at amazee.io, discussed security techniques and best practices when inheriting a large portfolio of Drupal sites. In an ideal world, when you’ve inherited a site, all modules would be up to date, system settings would be reasonably secure, and there would be system tests for everything. This, however, isn't usually the case with legacy sites. When you inherit a portfolio of sites, you will often need to create strategies for managing the security for this range of sites.

When it comes to Drupal security management, Blaize recommends that your first step should be getting visibility into what's happening on the live sites you've inherited. Are any sensitive files exposed? Are any insecure default settings enabled? Are there any insecure user accounts? It's essential to audit your sites for these and other issues.

Blaize’s final recommendations for security management include:

• Automating information gathering and presenting results in a useful format.
• Understanding security automation tools in light of your context.
• Not just focusing on module/core versions. Audit the state of the site as well.
• Integrating data and summarizing in ways that encourage and support action.

Documenting an Agile Team - How to Keep Up

In her talk, Alanna Burke, Community Manager and Developer Advocate at amazee.io, offered tips and best practices for documentation teams to keep up with the pace of an agile team. The first thing she recommends to documentation writers? Invite yourself to the technical meetings. Sometimes writers aren't always included in these meetings, so you'll need to make more of an effort to be there. Alanna also recommends being accessible and flexible to give your team dedicated places to discuss and view documentation. (Hint: create these spaces inside resources you already use, like Slack or Jira.) You should also have a process for moving from tickets to delivery. Following a sprint can help you prioritize.

Part of keeping up with an agile team is being aware of changes to your codebase before they happen. For this, Alanna recommends monitoring everything (e.g. pull requests), attending meetings and standups, and scheduling meetings with product owners or project managers.

When it comes to keeping track of changes and problems in your documentation, Alanna recommends some technical solutions:

• Keep an eye on Slack (or whatever messaging app your organization uses). Read the channels where updates are discussed.
• Use your organization's issue tracking software and subscribe to issues for updates.
• Watch Git repos and PRs.

Want to write excellent release notes? Alanna recommends making your process work for you by using templates. Also ask yourself if the information in your release notes is useful to users and human-readable. You should be giving your users actual information, such as what issues you've closed, security issues you've addressed, bugs you've fixed, and documentation you've written.

From Lando to Lagoon: The developer-focused workflow from local to production

Teams from Lando and Lagoon spent the last year refining our integration to give you a fast, fluid full-cycle development and deployment experience. At DrupalCon North America, Michael Schmid, co-founder and CTO at amazee.io and Lagoon, was joined live in our virtual booth by Mike Milano, Senior Architect at Tandem and Lando, for an inside look into the integration and gave attendees the opportunity to ask them anything about these awesome open source tools.

AMA and Meet the Amazeeng amazee.io Pets and Friends!

In addition to our expert sessions, the folks from amazee.io also hung out in our virtual booth for an "Ask Me Anything" event, where attendees could ask our team of WebOps and cloud hosting experts anything that was on their minds.

And we didn't want to leave our furry friends out of the fun, which is why we also hosted a casual meet and greet with the pets of amazee.io. DrupalCon NA attendees stopped by our booth to meet our animal pals and introduce us to their own pets. It was paw-some!

DrupalCon North America may be over… but the fun isn’t!

Attending the Government Summit? Don’t miss Michael Schmid’s session on Thursday, April 29 at 11:25 AM ET, “Are you and your sites ready for COVID-22?” He’ll be sharing the processes and architecture they used to achieve 100% uptime for the Australian government during COVID-19 related high-traffic events, including a single-day high of 103 million hits.

Have questions?

If you want to know more about amazee.io or open source WebOps (or maybe just want to share a cool memory from DrupalCon), get in touch with us today!