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In our recent webinar, Michael and Ben covered the “blue-green” functionality included in the recent Lagoon releases. We decided to call our implementation Active/Standby to avoid confusion and be more explicit about the action it performs.

Before joining amazee.io, I managed a Fortune 500 website with global traffic from B2B customers from household name brands. We were running a Drupal 7 site, which suffered inexplicable downtimes and latency.

1.7.0 brings the first release of the new Problems Database functionality, developed by our partners at Amazee Labs, along with the first couple of integrations. We’ll talk more shortly about the great potential for the Problems Database, but for now we’ve included the ability to collate Image vulnerability scans from Trivy (integrated with our Harbor install) and parse site audit and remediation activity generated by Drutiny).

amazee.io is a fully remote, global team, building the world's fastest-growing Open Source Hosting environment. With flexible working hours and worldwide remote distribution from Auckland, Zürich, and on to California, what’s it like to work for amazee.io?

Lagoon has rolled out functionality to enable a blue-green deployment strategy for our hosted sites, which we are calling Active/Standby. In this webinar, we will explain how to enable a site for Active/Standby, explain what the differences are between the environments, and run through the process of promoting a Standby site to Active.

Active/Standby deployments, also known as blue/green deployments, are a way to seamlessly switch over your production content. Your active (or green) environment is your current active production environment. Your standby (or blue) environment is your standby environment, where you have changes staged that are ready to roll out. The environments are otherwise identical, so the go-live is just a flip of a switch. All incoming traffic is now routed to your new active environment, and the previous active environment takes the standby position. 

The main reason for this release is to ensure that our images and infrastructure are ready to support Drupal 9 on release day. We’ll also be releasing a blog post outlining what we’ve put in place.

As everybody knows, Drupal 9 is just around the corner. As a hosting provider, we need to be able to make sure that our customers who wish to utilize Drupal 9 can do so. The release comes with a few environment requirements that we need to make sure we can handle, and adds a few more behind-the-scenes actions we needed to prepare ourselves.

As the interest in containerization continues to grow, so does the number of options to facilitate it. Kubernetes has not only become the industry standard to maintain, start, and deploy containers, but a broad open-source ecosystem has also been built around it. It can be challenging to navigate the growing set of possibilities. If your organization is considering a more hands-on, DIY approach to migrating to Kubernetes, we’ve laid out some key considerations for you.

As we start discussing what Lagoon 2.0 might look like, we’ve been working hard on our roadmap. In addition, - the updates we need to support Drupal 9 will hopefully be coming in the next couple of weeks. We’ve identified that the version of MariaDB (10.2.31) included in all Lagoon releases to 1.5.0 does not meet the minimum standard for Drupal 9 (10.3.7) – so we will be upgrading it to version 10.4.13, as per Alpine 3.11, as well as introducing example projects and tests for D9. Stay tuned!

After ten years as a back-end developer, Alanna decided a change was in order. Still carrying a torch for Drupal, content management systems, and helping others, she is now working as a documentation writer, trainer, and developer advocate at amazee.io. Alanna also serves as a track chair for DrupalCon North America, is on the leadership team of Drupal Diversity and Inclusion, and serves the Drupal Community Working Group as an ambassador to Drupal Diversity and Inclusion.

In our recent blog post Michael outlined why amazee.io is working so hard to make Lagoon work in managed Kubernetes. The benefits of better autoscaling and reduced maintenance obviously are the headline grabbers, but today we want to discuss one of the most important benefits to amazee.io and our customers: portability.

Hailing from the Isle of Man, and having lived in Canberra, Australia for the last 18 years, Toby has had a wide and diverse career, mostly technology focussed, but with a few interesting tangents (ask him about them sometime!). He’s a long-time map, data and open source nerd, and he’s happiest talking to people about the tech he’s passionate about.

When we started building Lagoon four years ago, best practices for containerized hosting were still being developed, and building everything based on OpenShift was an obvious choice, as it provided an enterprise-class solution. As the cloud-native landscape has grown, native Kubernetes has not only become the industry standard to maintain, start, and deploy containers, but a broad open-source ecosystem has been built around it, and now provides a lot of the tools and features that were previously only available in Openshift. 

Driven by a global pandemic, the world is changing at a rapid pace which requires all of us to adapt, reassess and rethink our daily lives. We are adapting our private lives (eg. taking care of and educating our children while schools and daycare are closed, leveraging modern online technology to connect more frequently with family members and friends) and adapting our professional life as most companies have switched to working from home.

As foreshadowed in the Lagoon 2020 roadmap, native Kubernetes support was always going to feature large in the first half of this year – we got a large portion of the work done in our Austin sprint and this is the release of that (and some follow-up) work. Rest assured that we’re still working on features and fixes for the Openshift components (the two can exist side-by-side quite happily for now). As we develop new features, we will take into consideration compatibility with both platforms.

With Lagoon Version 2 now in beta testing and its release on the horizon, we hosted a webinar to highlight Lagoon Version 2’s biggest and most exciting new feature: the capability to deploy into Native Kubernetes clusters.

We’re delighted to announce Franz Karlsberger as CEO - he will take up the amazee.io reins on April 1st, sharing management responsibilities with Michael Schmid and Thom Toogood, and supported by Dania Gerhardt for financial planning.

In the spirit of International Women’s History Month, we wanted to hear from one of our own female role models in the tech field; Dania Gerhardt, Co-founder of amazee.io and Chief Financial Officer of Amazee Group. For years, she has successfully supported not only amazee.io but the entire Amazee Group, and she stands as an example to all those who are looking to also one day become a leader in the field. So we sat down with Dania and asked about her own experience being a #WomaninTech. Here’s what she had to say

Until now, Lagoon users have been reliant on a suite of local dev tools, including our own homespun open source tool, Pygmy. As amazee.io’s primary focus is developing and supporting the Lagoon hosting platform, maintaining and enhancing Pygmy has often been less of a priority. Because of this, the local development process has always had room for improvement.