Launching my first Drupal 8 website — in my basement!
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I've been working with Drupal 8 for a long time, keeping Honeypot and some other modules up to date, and doing some dry-runs of migrating a few smaller sites from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, just to hone my D8 familiarity.
I finally launched a 'for real' Drupal 8 site, which is currently running on Drupal 8 HEAD—on a cluster of Raspberry Pi 2 computers in my basement! You can view the site at http://www.pidramble.com/, and I've already started posting some articles about running Drupal 8 on the servers, how I built the cluster, some of the limitations of at-home webhosting, etc.
Some of the things I've already learned from building and running this cluster for the past few days:
- Drupal 8 (just core, alone) is awesome. Building out simple sites with zero contributed modules, and no custom code, is a real possibility in Drupal 8. Drupal 7 will never feel the same again :(
- Drupal 8 is finally fast; not super fast, but fast enough. And with some recent cache stampede protections that have been added, Drupal 8 is running much more stable in my testing—stable enough that I was finally comfortable launching a site on Drupal 8 on these Raspberry Pis!
- My (very) limited upload bandwidth isn't yet an issue. I only have 4-5 Mbps up, and as long as I host most images externally, serving up tiny 8-10 KB resources for normal page loads allows for a pretty large amount of traffic without a hiccup. Or, more importantly, without interfering with my day-to-day Internet use as a work-from-home employee!
- It's really awesome being able to see the live traffic to the servers using the LEDs on the front. See for yourself: Nginx Load Balancer Visualization w/ LEDs. It's fun watching live traffic a few feet away from my desk, especially when I do things like tweet the URL (immediately following, I can see all the requests come in from Twitter-related bots!).
I'm hoping to continue writing about my experiences with Drupal 8 (especially on the Pi cluster), etc. in the next few weeks, both here and elsewhere!
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