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What is Pantheon?

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    Manage Drupal Sites with Pantheon What is Pantheon? Addison Berry
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    To get things started off,
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    let's actually ask the question and answer "What is Pantheon?"
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    In this lesson, we're going to define what Pantheon is
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    and give you a little bit of a sense of the features that it provides
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    and why you would use it. And we'll also take a really quick look
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    at some people who are already out there using it
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    so you can get a sense of sort of the scale and breadth of what people are doing with Pantheon.
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    Now, Pantheon defines itself/describes itself
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    on its site as a website management platform.
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    And that is an integrated set of tools and services
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    allowing teams to build, launch, and manage websites.
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    So it gives you some sense,
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    but it doesn't necessarily really explain what it is doing for you
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    other than it lets you manage sites.
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    So here's a little bit— we're going to go through these
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    in a little bit more detail to get a sense of what these things mean.
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    So you can actually manage all of your sites.
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    You have multiple projects going; you'll be able to manage all of them in one place.
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    It is designed for best practices,
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    so it puts a lot of development processes in place
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    that are considered best practices.
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    So all of that stuff is in place for you and you can just use it
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    without having to actually figure it out and come up with these yourself.
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    It also is taking care of a lot of sysadmin stuff for you
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    on the back end so you don't have to worry about that
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    and you can worry about building your site.
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    And it's scalable and reliable.
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    It's got a lot of stuff in place
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    to help you not worry about those things.
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    So let's dive into a little more detail on these.
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    So managing your sites, there's a Developer Dashboard
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    which gives you an overview of all the sites that you have,
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    kind of what status they are in.
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    Are they in development currently? Is it actually launched and live?
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    Where are things? You can actually manage team access with this.
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    So you have your dashboard with all of your sites,
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    but you could also have a team associated with your account
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    and then you can control who has access to which sites.
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    It has a lot of really fine-grained controls
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    so that you can kind of get an overview of everything, your sites and your team, at the same time.
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    As I mentioned, you can track your status. You can also keep track of your backups,
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    again, another important thing in that infrastructure's built-in for you.
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    But in this dashboard you get an overview
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    so you understand the state of all of your sites,
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    not just a listing of them.
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    And you can also deal with core updates.
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    So if you are running Drupal or WordPress
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    and you just want to update your sites to the latest version
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    because there's a security release that's come out for core,
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    it's very easy to actually manage that directly from within your Developer Dashboard
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    without having to monkey around a whole lot in the sites themselves.
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    Now, for best practices, for me, this is probably one of—
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    this is the big why in a lot of ways for me
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    in that it sets everything up for you to do best practices
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    and without having to set the infrastructure up yourself
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    or figure out what those patterns are. It just has everything set up that way.
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    So it uses Version Control.
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    You can use SFTP, but it's set up
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    intimately to work with Git.
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    And kind of related to that, there's the workflow,
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    the best practices workflow, having a development environment,
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    a testing environment, and then the live environment.
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    And Pantheon is set up,
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    it creates these three different environments for you
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    that are the same site, and then you can push your code up
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    and you can bring your content down and keep everything in sync
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    and everything is set up for you to be able to do that
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    without having to set up the infrastructure yourself.
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    Also related to the Version Control thing in terms of you can use your—
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    you can use Git. They also have something called Multidev
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    which we'll be looking at later that lets you have multiple developers
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    working on development versions of the environment
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    and then going to test and then to live.
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    So lots of really great tools
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    for making sure that your processes are good.
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    They also have performance tools. Varnish and Redis are part of Pantheon.
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    And this is kind of industry-standard tools these days.
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    And then there is integration with New Relic for monitoring.
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    So if you are using New Relic as your monitoring service
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    which is a really great service, it integrates seamlessly
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    with your Pantheon environment.
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    And of course because you're using Pantheon's servers and system
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    a lot of the sysadmin stuff has been sort of taken care of for you.
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    It's optimized and tuned for CMSes specifically, Drupal and WordPress.
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    So it is specifically built for that.
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    It's not a general kind of hosting platform that you can do those things on.
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    It's designed for Drupal and WordPress.
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    They have superfast horizontal scaling.
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    So when you—when the site needs to scale
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    to handle the incoming traffic that you have,
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    it's going to do it quickly, seamlessly,
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    and it goes horizontally which is really robust.
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    So all of these things are sort of automatically taken care of for you in the background.
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    You don't have to manually figure these things out
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    and, again, have to go through all the pieces yourself.
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    Pantheon's going to take care of that for you automatically.
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    We'll just take a look at the reliability and security.
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    So they have both redundancy and crossover.
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    So redundancy and you have a backup system in place.
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    You have multiple, so if one thing goes down, one server goes down,
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    there's others to take its place.
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    That's an example of redundancy. There's also crossover.
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    So if something were to happen and you need to switch over to another system,
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    that happens, again, automatically and sort of seamlessly for you.
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    Their crossover plan is really robust.
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    So when things happen, if things start falling down,
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    there are other things standing up,
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    and moving over to those is super simple.
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    They have some standard stuff like Denial of Service protection,
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    Network Intrusion Protection.
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    They are PCI Certified, so if you are doing anything that needs PCI compliance—
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    a lot of ecommerce requires PCI compliance—
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    you can set it up and you don't have to worry about that side of things.
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    It's already taken care of for you.
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    And then there's also some built-in antivirus stuff going on.
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    So again, lots of tools that are built-in.
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    You don't have to worry about that. You let Pantheon handle it
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    and you focus on building your websites with your teams
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    and taking care of that, which is the important work that you're trying to do.
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    And this is just a quick look at who uses Pantheon.
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    These are some examples from their website.
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    You can see there's some pretty big names.
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    And it's a wide range. You have some universities in there;
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    you have media in there; you have tech;
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    there's financial institutions.
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    There are all kinds of organizations and teams
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    who are using Pantheon. It's not just for a particular vertical.
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    It's not just for a particular size of team.
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    Tiny team, a team of one can use Pantheon,
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    and a team at the size of say Dell or Cisco can use Pantheon as well.
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    So for a quick recap, we just did a really quick look
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    at the fact that Pantheon is a website management platform
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    and exactly what does that mean. What tools is it giving you?
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    We looked at the features that it does provide,
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    and we just took a real quick look at who uses it
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    so you can see that you probably fit into that range of one to hundreds
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    in terms of people who can make really effective use of Pantheon.

Manage Drupal Sites with Pantheon

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What Is Pantheon?

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7 minutes 55 seconds // HDCC //

Pantheon is more than just a hosting service. It is a powerful tool to manage your websites, and handle deployments. Pantheon provides a great framework for development best practices as well as making sure the platform you are running on is truly optimized for Drupal sites. In this overview presentation we'll introduce you to the features Pantheon provides and why you would use them to host your Drupal sites.

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