Sector(s)

Team Members

podarok, danylevskyi, cpaulnock, sanchiz, anpolimus, andreymaximov

Project Team

See team information at Open Y site.

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

Open Y distribution is one of the largest projects on Drupal.org when counting by the number of changes, committed to its codebase by different partners.

For the non-technical savvy community visual representation of technology is essential.

Developers used to understand technology even from code, but when it comes to business - UX demo is a key.

In order to deliver technology for Open Y community, which is the technology heart of the YMCA community in United States and abroad, Open Y core team maintains about a hundred sandboxes, nightly/hourly rebuilt for the stakeholders and strategists to plan their improvements.

Open Y consists of ~450 custom and contrib Drupal/Vue.js/Reactjs components, which creates significant maintenance challenge for the team to take care of. 

List of sandboxes indexes we have

In order to upgrade distribution to Drupal 9 with a help of this infrastructure, we spent ~6 months of planning and maintenance and prepared a dedicated case-study for you to read.

About the project

Goals and requirements:

  • to provide sandboxes for the community to be able to play with new features of the distribution in a safe manner without fear of breaking anything
  • to ensure we have sandboxes for different features of distribution, like Activity Finder, Virtual Y, Membership Framework, and so on
  • to ensure stable sandboxes being rebuilt every 2 hours to ensure there are no leftovers from other community members in the demo
  • create demo content for the distribution to have a full-featured site that looks almost identical to real production Open Y use cases ( no lorem ipsum )
  • to ensure sandboxes rebuilt overnight in order to be up to date with the latest code

Outcome

  • best practices from CIBox project were used, like - Jenkins, Ansible, Jenkins Slave executors in order to secure Jenkins configs and host sandboxes on dedicated, 0 cost server behind a firewall
  • Index pages were created by leveraging fast site generator on node/webpack and approved UX by the core team
  • introduced server cleaners, unattended packages updaters on servers in order to minimize the need for maintenance and lack of free space

Why Drupal was chosen

Back in 2015, Drupal was chosen as a replacement for the proprietary PHP system, which was too slow for change management and too expensive for the non-profit YMCA. Since then Open Y did more than 80 releases of distribution and hundreds of deployments across US, Canada, and Ukraine

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

How sandboxes are configured from a DevOps perspective could be viewed on Open Y YouTube channel