A new Drupal 7 site, devops and hosting
Sparta Science is an industry-leading solution in the US. It reduces injuries and optimises performance with validated scientific assessments. Sparta is a great example of what we mean when we say no two Drupal applications are alike.
A lot of Drupal websites do doing similar things. Of course, presenting editorially-controlled content in a structured and templated way. But there are organisations doing amazing things with Drupal that change the profile of the application.
California-based Sparta Performance Science uses Drupal in an unexpected way. They have embraced the power of the API, and tools like the Views module. So, they created a platform for athletes and coaches to view complex data about their physical performance. That gathered during tailored training sessions, using specialist measuring equipment. This data is fed into Drupal and processed using custom-crafted Drush commands. They are then available to view within the pages of a given athlete's profile.
What we did
The requirements of crunching large amounts of data at the command line are different to your usual Drupal project. Compare it to the requirements of an organisation like ActionAid. They mostly serve cached content to anonymous users. And that is exactly why one size can’t fit all.
Sparta has many clients, each with the need for privacy and data separation. Furthermore, they each have their own completely separate site. Essentially a copy of the platform. For example, some are competing teams. So having a hosting company securing their data and is ISO 27001 is important.
With Code Enigma, Sparta can host all their clients on a single server. Because the usage patterns are sporadic and most of the processing happens at the command line. With a PaaS product, each site would have a distinct and separate cost. Furthermore, the command line processing power needed would make that cost high.
We provide managed Jenkins for Sparta. So they benefit from automated deployment tools and developer workflows from PaaS. Additionally, unlimited customisation and much more cost-effective resource management.
Finally, on top of our managed servers, we run a Drupal Developer Support contract with Sparta. They use this for ad-hoc code reviews to requests for performance investigation of specific scripts or pages with New Relic. Sometimes they ask us to create a new Jenkins job for them to service a new customer.
