The College of Humanities has created a Drupal-based infrastructure using the open-source project Aegir and Amazon Web Services. By using Aegir with AWS we have gained the benefits of many of the management functions that are provided by solutions such as Acquia and Pantheon. In addition to the ease of management and accessibility for less technical users this solution provides all of the scaling (up/out and auto/manual), High Availability, and performance benefits of running in AWS.
Aegir provides a web-based control panel (built in Drupal!) for managing sites. It enables users to clone sites, move files, and change Git branches/tags for a site all within the GUI. It also provides the ability to run multiple servers and manage standardized Drupal installs. Along with the standardized Drupal installs comes the ability to test updates on clones of as many sites as you wish before completing the upgrade of all of your sites with a couple of clicks. Also, it’s free. Coupling Aegir with AWS allows for the creation of a very flexible platform from which to manage your website eco-system. AWS can be leveraged with several different configurations supported by Aegir, from single-server installs to multi-server configs of every kind.