architecture

Collections signal major shift in Ansible ecosystem

Every successful software project I've worked on reaches a point where architectural changes need to be made to ensure the project's continued success. I've been involved in the Drupal community for over a decade, and have written about the successes and failures resulting from a major rearchitecture in version 8. Apple's Macintosh OS had two major failed rewrites which were ultimately scrapped as Apple moved on to Mac OS X.

It's a common theme, and because change is hard, the first response to a major shift in a software project is often negative. Distrust over the project's stewards, or anger about a voice not being heard are two common themes. Even though it has nothing to do with the change (which was being discussed 3 years ago), the acquisition of Red Hat by IBM last year didn't do anything to assuage conspiracy theorists!

Hosted Apache Solr's Revamped Docker-based Architecture

I started Hosted Apache Solr almost 10 years ago, in late 2008, so I could more easily host Apache Solr search indexes for my Drupal websites. I realized I could also host search indexes for other Drupal websites too, if I added some basic account management features and a PayPal subscription plan—so I built a small subscription management service on top of my then-Drupal 6-based Midwestern Mac website and started selling a few Solr subscriptions.

Back then, the latest and greatest Solr version was 1.4, and now-popular automation tools like Chef and Ansible didn't even exist. So when a customer signed up for a new subscription, the pipeline for building and managing the customer's search index went like this:

Hosted Apache Solr original architecture

Original Hosted Apache Solr architecture, circa 2009.

Follow up questions to 'Don't drown in your open source project'

After I posted my presentation slides, transcript, and video from my presentation Don't drown in your open source project!, I received two follow-up questions (1, 2) on Twitter that I thought deserved a little better response than what I could do in 140 characters. So, here goes:

Do you ever abandon old projects? Thoughts on right/wrong ways?

Yes, in fact I've abandoned probably a dozen or so projects. The simplest examples: