In case you missed the news, Drupal is growing. As Drupal grows it continues to evolve and become a critical component of mission critical, high performance systems. Development teams are growing and becoming more geographically dispersed. Systems needs are increasing as Drupal becomes more capable. The days of using a single LAMP machine to run a site were there for you to learn but do not apply in the enterprise world. I work regularly on Drupal sites that have as many as 51 different servers communicating with each other and working together. It's no longer uncommon to manage multiple datasources (MySQL, SQL, MongoDb, Reddis, text files on s3, etc.) or multiple server types (Varnish, Memcache, NGiNX, Lucene, etc.) in addition to simply writing the code that got us here in the first place.

With so many facets adding to the complexity of an overall system it is easy to become overwhelmed. How many times have you deployed something only to find out it works great on your machine but fails miserably on the production server? What branching strategy should your developers use? How do you guarantee a stable environment that lets developers and product people innovate? What kind of a person can connect the dots between developers, infrastructure and business and why is an important new field?

I'm the release manager at Examiner.com and will walk you what it takes to successfully manage and deploy complex Drupal systems to a heavily trafficed and highly performant site. I will introduce you to some technologies you may have heard of including puppet, capistrano, jenkins and git. I'll outline deployment strategies that work and that minimize the impact on your teams.