Drupal 8 Site Construction

AWS and Drupal 8 marriage

Hello all, I have been away for a while but now I am back with an update regarding my experience with installing and administering a full Drupal 8 solution via AWS!
I first encountered Drupal when looking for a CMS for a prototype I developed for the DC Government back in 2012. Back then, the Drupal community was just as alive as it is now, and I had a great time looking through the Drupal forums for help with understanding just what was Drupal. I decided to go with Joomla for that particular project because it was the only worthy CMS being provided by my web host. For that particular project, however, the addition of CMS was more an over-engineered solution, as the customer very rarely used the Web interface for interacting with the system.

Fast forward to recently, I had begun searching for a CMS again for a company called B.H. Griner, which happens to be owned by a friend of mine. This recruiting agency's website was in dire need of an upgrade, and the website administrator was unwilling to move beyond the web design technologies of the past. Recognizing that my friend's website could use a touch of CMS, I remembered my experience with learning Drupal and how easy it was for end-users to understand and add content. I suggested that she do the research as well, and she decided that my suggestion of Drupal would greatly help her business.

The requirements for her upgrade to Drupal included:

• An overall cost reduction of 50% or more
• An email forwarding service
• Some recruit management system for tracking prospects
• A system for keeping track of positions received from clients
• The ability to have anonymous users provide simple contact information for applying to positions
• Secure Socket Layer coverage of the site
• Domain hosting and configuration for email records
• Potential to scale up for higher traffic if necessary
• 24/7 availability within the USA

So, I first looked into a hosting service for help with these requirements. Naturally, the prices were steep. Each host that met the requirements necessary to begin the migration wanted 50% more than what she was paying initially (granted, she had been grandfathered into her hosting after at least 20 years of loyalty). I informed my friend that she would benefit greatly from a custom implementation on a cloud-based service. After she reviewed the cost-benefit analysis of each host and potential cloud solution, she decided that it was the AWS custom cloud implementation made the most sense. So then I began to design an implementation using many of the AWS services. I used EC2 and ELB for the Drupal 8 cluster configuration, SES and lambda for the email forwarding, Route 53 for the domain hosting and Certificate Manager for the SSL implementation.

In all, the experience setting up the SES and coding a custom forwarding Lambda was the sticky point, but once I understood the SES requirements and applied for a limit removal, the SES system began working smoothly. Installing the SSL via CM and ELB was much easier than I could have imagined and I was successful in providing a very solid domain configuration via Route 53. Installation and configuration of Drupal 8 was a breeze with Drush and Composer! After hardening the Drupal 8 and linux box, I also set up a few custom content models and views for their recruiting management and trained them on how to add content to the site. Now everyone can hit their website via bhgriner.com!