For 12 years, the job of the web agency Koriolis and the eight people who compose it, is to design and maintain sites developed on the open source CMS Drupal. His main skills therefore lie in web development and not the administration of an infrastructure.
Koriolis has different client profiles in its portfolio, including VSEs/SMEs and large accounts, for which the agency notably manages editorial sites with high traffic and requiring tailor-made solutions. “Little box”, as its founder, Sébastien Lissarrague, describes it, its priority is the production of sites – and of factories to sites.
Hosting managed in code
In order to focus its resources on the development part, Koriolis uses a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solution provided by Platform.sh – another digital player encountered in the Drupal ecosystem.
For several years, the VSE has therefore been using PaaS to free itself from the management of the infrastructure and the problem of hosting. Even better, hosting is handled directly in the code written by the agency’s developers.
“No need for a DevOps to deploy a server or any other action. The solution adds a layer of abstraction and standards now mastered by my developers. Directly in their code, they describe the platform on which the code must be deployed”, specifies Sébastien Lissarrague.
The gain is estimated at one to two FTE (full-time equivalent) by the founder, which is a significant profit for a company of this size. The advantages are not limited to these aspects, however. He also believes that the solution has helped to embed good development practices into work habits.
Continuous deployment within reach of VSEs
Packaging code, making commits in Git, workflows… all good practices for putting into production and managing servers are shared by the team. The key: the same methodology allowing for agility in the monitoring and evolution of the sites. The agency thus has no Ops and concentrates on its core business.
The gains lie in the design as well as the support and maintenance of Drupal sites. “Everything is handled in code. It is possible to make a production iso clone in five minutes to work on. Once the modifications have been validated, you can redeploy. Gone are the days of FTP and deployments on servers that are not always identical, relates Sébastien Lissarrague.
Farewell also to the anxieties linked to these practices and the uncertainties as to the operation in production of the developments carried out on the test or pre-production environment. The agency can thus carry out five to six production launches on a site during the same day. “We moved to continuous integration,” says the leader.
This mode of operation has not been called into question by the evolution of the organization of teleworking. The agency was already operating in distributed mode, with employees based in particular in the regions. In addition, all employees are equipped with laptops. Access to development environments is online.
Hybrid work, “a real challenge”
However, the hybridization required some adaptations, the most complex of which were not technical. On a day-to-day basis, employees communicate and work via Slack, their “central tool”.
Daily meetings are held by videoconference via Google Meet. Its use aims above all to maintain the human link between the members of the agency. Collaborative work is also based on shared documents such as Google Docs. To track tasks and assign them, Koriolis has an application: Wrike.
“The real challenge is that of management. Everyone’s goals should be pretty clear. When you are used to communicating directly from the same place, teleworking requires adaptations. Even if it is not complicated to adopt the tools, it is a challenge to properly set up the relevant processes and to get organised”, testifies Sébastien Lissarrague.
“The tool allows a lot of things, but it’s not so easy to achieve coherent schedules and follow-ups that work. It’s like with an ERP. You don’t start with a ready-to-use ERP. All the processes adapted to the company must be integrated into it. It’s a real job … which we are still working on, ”he concludes.