Sector(s)

Team Members

salimlakhani, Amet lenis

Project Team

  • Voice of America (VOA) Digital Team – Owned the sites and defined requirements around cost, performance, and compliance.

  • Prime Contractor – Managed project oversight and collaborated with DevPanel during phased evaluation and migration.

  • DevPanel DevOps Team – Delivered AWS automation, migration tooling, performance/load testing, and ongoing 24/7 infrastructure support

Learn more https://tidycal.com/devpanel

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

DevPanel actively contributes to the Drupal ecosystem by:

  • Supporting DrupalForge.org, a community-driven platform that provides one-click demo sites, reusable templates, and training environments for Drupal projects.

  • Sponsoring DrupalCamps, DrupalCons, and contribution days, often providing DevPanel-powered environments to lower setup barriers for new contributors.

  • Sharing case studies, documentation, and best practices that help organizations adopt Drupal on modern cloud infrastructure.

  • Enabling trainers, agencies, and nonprofits to use DevPanel for workshops, which expands community access to scalable Drupal environments without vendor lock-in

A U.S. government news agency serving 1–2B monthly pageviews across 47 Drupal sites faced rising Acquia costs (≈$1M/yr for just 4 sites) and limited infrastructure control. They evaluated an AWS migration using DevPanel—deployed in their own AWS account—with a point-and-click dashboard, browser-based dev tools, full root access, VPN support, and 24/7 DevOps. In a phased pilot, average migration time was <2 days/site, projected hosting dropped to ≈$200K/yr (>75% savings), performance improved, and auto-scaling handled >1M hits/min.

About the project

The project’s goal was to modernize hosting for Voice of America’s 47+ Drupal sites, which serve 1–2 billion pageviews per month. The agency needed to:

  • Reduce Costs – Annual Acquia hosting was projected at ~$1M for just four sites, making full rollout financially unsustainable.

  • Gain Control – Full root access and the ability to use AWS-native services for performance, security, and compliance.

  • Ensure Reliability & Scale – Infrastructure that could auto-scale to millions of hits per minute while remaining secure and compliant with federal standards.

  • Improve Developer Experience – A modern platform with browser-based dev tools (VS Code, PhpMyAdmin), faster deployments, and 24/7 DevOps support.

Outcome: By migrating to DevPanel inside its own AWS account, the agency cut hosting costs by over 75% (from ~$1M/year to ~$200K/year), improved performance (sites loaded ~1 second faster), and proved elastic scale under >1M hits/minute. Developers gained independence from ticket-based hosting support, security was strengthened with VPN and compliance-ready deployments, and the agency achieved long-term sustainability free from vendor lock-in

Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal was selected because it is a proven, government-grade CMS trusted worldwide for high-traffic, mission-critical sites. For VOA, Drupal’s multilingual capabilities were essential—powering 47+ language sites reaching global audiences. Its open-source flexibility ensured the agency wasn’t locked into proprietary platforms, while its strong security track record aligned with federal compliance requirements. Combined with DevPanel’s AWS automation, Drupal provided the ideal foundation: scalable content delivery at over 11 million hits per day, with the governance and extensibility needed for a U.S. government news organization

Technical Specifications

Drupal version: