infrastructure

Eating one's own dogfood -vs- dining out

The importance of project management tools is almost never fully appreciated. I am shocked at how common it is for a group of developers to go working without version control, ticket tracking, development documentation and so on. The very first thing I do when working with a new client is to make sure that they get these tools in place if they haven't already.

Those who are used to working without a complete set of project management tools never fail to appreciate the benefits of them once they are introduced. I consider it next to impossible for a team to work together without managing code and tasks in an efficient and highly organized way.

Hopefully you do not need to be sold on this idea and are using CVS or SVN to manage your project already. You likely have some sort of ticket system. It is a little less likely that you have both of these components integrated with each other.

When it comes to choosing a solution for project management software, a die-hard Drupal user has a dilemna. On one hand, Drupal seems as though it should be the perfect solution. It's fully customizable, has lots of nifty project management related modules and, most importantly, it's Drupal! Why would you not use it? "Eating your own dogfood" is the way to go, right? Meh...

Big Time Scaling

This is a very insightful article on MediaTemple's efforts to build one of the first massive web hosting grid: Anatomy of MySQL on the GRID

The Weak Link in Drupal Scalability (99.9% of you can ignore this article)

Drupal is as scalable as the applications it relies on. While there's nothing preventing Drupal itself from being scaled across any number of web servers, scalability of open-source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL is an ongoing issue.

While these databases do support replication, that's not always enough. For a very small percentage of websites, daily user visits are counted not in hundreds or thousands but in hundreds of thousands. Chances are pretty good that you're site is not in this minority, but if it is (or if you anticipate it will be), you will need to consider the limitations imposed by resources that are necessarily shared by the tools you are using. It doesn't do much good to have 100 redundant webservers if they are sharing a single NFS mount. Likewise, open-source database technology currently suffers from a lack of "shared nothing" capability.

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