Why Large Scale Drupal Users Need Iron.io To Increase Application Responsiveness
We’re always pleased to receive stories about how Iron.io products have helped make peoples’ lives easier. This is the story about how Schwartz Media from the land down under, addressed the challenging task of managing and deploying multiple Drupal sites on the Pantheon platform.
Owen Kelly is the Director of Technology at Schwartz Media, publisher of The Saturday Paper, the Monthly and Quarterly Essay. Owen and his team brought IronMQ into their Pantheon-based framework to manage Push queues for processing PHP jobs. These jobs perform a variety of tasks, all processing in the background.
By distributing tasks, Schwartz Media was able to accelerate the primary event loop, while allocating and scaling out asynchronous activities. The net benefit is faster processing with less overhead for the Schwartz Media technology team.
“If deploying and managing websites is a team sport, then large scale publishers like Schwartz Media represent the Pro Leagues. Pantheon is committed to the success of publishers with large scale Drupal implementations and we’re excited that Schwartz Media has achieved such an agile framework with Pantheon and Iron.io.” says Josh Koenig, Co-Founder and Head of Developer Experience at Pantheon.
Quick Integration
After a quick 2-hour integration, Owen was able to accelerate new and updated site deployments by moving processing jobs to IronMQ. As part of this implementation, IronMQ pushes payloads to the Schwartz Media receiver, which then processes the job. By implementing this distributed approach, Owen and his team delivered a secure container-based approach to prevent sharing of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). In order to provide failsafe processing, the team uses cron jobs to clean-up any missed jobs that might error-out within the receiver.
“Everything is fast again [with IronMQ], and our subscriptions team is happy,” said Owen Kelly.
Schwartz Media is a great success story as evidenced by the power of leveraging IronMQ for Drupal deployments. We’re always big fans of stories about content management and delivery, as they drive a vast majority of use cases. It’s especially appealing within Drupal-based applications because many cases involve large implementations running at extreme scale and availability.
“With Iron.io we have built a really simple background job processor, that saves our customer support team up to 5 seconds on every transaction they do. We create a job on our end, pop the job ID in the MQ, the MQ then pushes the ID back to our receiver which completes the job. And it took less than 2-hours to build, test and deploy.” according to Kelly.
Talk about measurable benefits. We wish Owen and his team continued success, and we look forward to seeing more developments to come.
How to Get Started
To give Iron.io a try, sign up for a free IronWorker or IronMQ account today at Iron.io.
As a reward for signing up, we’ll even provide you with a 30-day trial of advanced features so that you can see how processing at scale will change the way you think about application development.
