CMS hosting, the Pernod Ricard way.
How we evolved from decentralised, un-managed web hosting to a worldwide platform for building, delivering, hosting and monitoring dozens of websites.
The beginning of the story
First of all, I need to give you a little bit of context. Pernod Ricard is the world’s second biggest company in the wines & spirits industry. We produce & distribute hundreds of brands, worldwide. And I’m pretty sure you’ve already enjoyed a cocktail based on one of our famous whiskies, rums or vodkas :)
To talk about our brands and products, our affiliates — more that 80 in the world — have built websites, since the early 2000’s for some of them.
So at the beginning, was the web-anarchy. Each affiliate worked with different agencies, building websites on various CMS, each hosted on different providers. It was very hard to make an inventory of our web legacy, and so, nearly impossible to control.
But we (Pernod Ricard HeadQuarter) needed to take control on the websites ecosystem for different reasons :
- Cost: each affiliate was building websites from scratch without a common base, deploying on specific host associated with a dedicated contract each time.
- Security: the diversity of technical stacks for the websites made security management extremely hard,
- Time to market: the lack of global platform for building websites implied a loss of time for each affiliate that had to choose agency, technology and host for their new projects.
Building a web platform
So we decided to build a web platform that first relied on two pillars: Pantheon and Global CMS
To make it short, Pantheon is a WebOps platform. It’s a PaaS (Platform as a Service) that allows you to create websites based on the WordPress & Drupal CMS, without having to worry about the infrastructure. So, we only manage data and applications, Pantheon manages all the technical part. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Creating a new website is a matter of clicks and boom! Your out-of-the-box CMS is ready in minutes, and 3 environnements provided(development/test/live). The whole thing is autoscaling thanks to a container based architecture, autoproviding SSL support, integrated Git, and so on.I invite you to have a look at the official site for more details on the platform.
Global CMS is a custom Wordpress upstream on Pantheon. An upstream is a kind of WordPress template that can be instantiated to create websites. Our upstream is made of carefully hand-picked modules (SEOPress, WPML, Advances Custom Fields Pro, Oasis Workflow, …) and of hand-crafted custom modules (to ease the integration to our IS : SSO, Product Information Management, Digital Asset Management, Consumer Database, or to add business capabilities : Cocktail module for instance).
With Pantheon and Global CMS we solved a lot of issues. Our websites are hosted in a unique place, built on top of a dedicated Wordpress template, and can be deployed in a matter of minutes thanks to the WebOps functionalities of Pantheon.
Leveraging the web platform
Delivering websites was simplified with the platform, but quickly we needed to add more control over it.
That’s why we have implemented an ecosystem around Pantheon and Global CMS, to leverage the web platform.
Websites portfolio
We have connected Pantheon to our Application Portfolio management tool, named SNAKE, to register each website created and enrich it with business and technical informations (owners, business capabilities, integrations, …)
Monitoring & Security
Our websites are checked regularly with Site24x7 probes, and all the Global CMS modules are scanned with SonarCloud to find potential security issues.
We export Pantheon data to build PowerBI dashboards where we can follow-up in details the websites.
Here, we can have an overview of the websites evolution, monitor here the versions of Wordpress, PHP, modules, and even list the modules with security issues, and then inform the websites’ owners.
We have developed jobs are able to mass update the WordPress core or the modules, to enforce the security and be up-to-date.
The data export and the mass update are based on the terminus command line tool provided by Pantheon. Technically, these are containers running on Azure ACI as scheduled tasks.
This ecosystem is continuously evolving and we are daily working on it to add new features!
With ingredients such as Pantheon, Global CMS and custom devs around them, we have created tasty brand new cocktail, don’t you think?
If you were interested by this article, you can have a look to this classy video we made with the help of Next Video. I would be very happy too to have your thoughts about that story and hear about yours !
