I n d u s t r y P e r s P e c t I v e

Transforming Web Technology Across Arizona State University’s Campuses: Embracing a Website Management Platform for Higher Education Websites

At Arizona State University, web developers are creating great websites with the click of a button and eliminating self-hosting challenges at the same time.

Table of ContentsThe Move to Centralization .........................................2

The Partnership ...........................................................2

ASU Webspark .............................................................3

The Advantages of Outsourcing with Pantheon .........4

Conclusion ...................................................................4

I n d u s t r y P e r s P e c t I v eI n d u s t r y P e r s P e c t I v e

2

I n d u s t r y P e r s P e c t I v e

Imagine spinning up a new Drupal site in less than 10

minutes…without any configuration or servers required.

Today, at Arizona State University (ASU) web developers

are doing just that. They’re creating great websites rather than

worrying about the complexity of web servers or infrastructure,

thanks to the collaborative efforts of ASU’s University Technology

Office (UTO), website management platform Pantheon, and web

design and development agency Kalamuna.

UTO is in the process of transforming web technology

across ASU’s colleges and departments by delivering an

innovative new site-building tool called Webspark. Running

on Pantheon and built by Kalamuna, Webspark is a quick and

easy way to spin up a web standard, feature-rich ASU site. With

the two technologies, UTO is managing hundreds of websites

throughout the university community more cost-effectively.

So how did all this come about?

The Move To CenTralizaTion“Prior to 2007,” says Daniel Garcia-Mont, ASU’s Web

Application Developer Lead, “IT services throughout the

university were pretty decentralized. Colleges, departments,

and even units all had their own IT staff.”

In 2007, however, ASU began a push to centralize IT

services with the goal of more quickly modernizing ASU’s IT

infrastructure.

To achieve that goal, UTO realized they needed to develop

strategic partnerships with vendors who offered the best IT

service or products in the field. “Rather than have individual

colleges or departments go out and purchase IT services or

products, we would purchase that service centrally and by

doing so leverage our size and reduce our cost across the

organization,” Garcia-Mont says.

Out of that push for centralization came the creation of

UTO’s legacy web hosting service. “It had been designed to be

good enough to replace the plethora of web servers that had

been set up under people’s desks or utility closets throughout

the university,” Garcia-Mont says, though it was not, he readily

admits, designed to be highly reliable. “For the most part, it

was meant for low-traffic sites.”

Though the legacy hosting service worked okay for a

while, the service, Garcia-Mont acknowledges, became

expensive and difficult to manage. At the same time, since the

hosting service was free, many sites were created and then

abandoned, creating a security risk for the university.

UTO’s goal was to improve the service. “We wanted to

get the best tools into the hands of the university community

for web development. We also wanted to provide the best

experience for what I call the hosting pillars: development,

deployment, and maintenance,” Garcia-Mont explains.

So, in 2012, UTO decided to outsource the ASU web

hosting service. “But finding a partner that could provide

a better hosting service—one that overcame some of the

architectural limitations at a reasonable price—was elusive at

first,” he says.

The ParTnershiPEnter Pantheon, a website development and management

platform for Drupal sites and, more recently, for WordPress—

including all plugins, themes, and custom code. The Pantheon

platform makes building and launching Drupal and WordPress

sites easier and faster while creating more manageable sites.

“We provide the underlying technology and tools for

organizations with hundreds or even thousands of websites,”

says Jeff Pflueger, Director, Agencies and Alliances at

Pantheon. “Through our workflow tools, organizations can

realize efficiencies in their work.”

For example, one workflow tool that Pantheon offers

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I n d u s t r y P e r s P e c t I v eI n d u s t r y P e r s P e c t I v eI n d u s t r y P e r s P e c t I v e

to every website on its platform is “dev-test-live.” It lets

the IT team develop and test in exact replicas of the live

environment, eliminating the risk of deploying bad code and

letting multiple developers work on a project without stepping

on each other’s toes.

“It’s a best practice in web development,” says Pflueger,

“where people are not making changes directly to their

production website without testing them first. But setting that

up yourself,” Pflueger continues, “is often too hard or too

cumbersome. So people sort of avoid it. Pantheon’s approach

is to make these best practices available for everybody

instantly at the click of a button.”

According to Pflueger, Pantheon also recognizes that

every university has its own unique requirements around such

things as branding, accessibility for people with disabilities, or

responsive design so websites work across devices.

“These things aren’t very well addressed with a single

application,” he says. “Universities that are standardizing on

Pantheon have the ability to build their own custom [code

base] starting point—in ASU’s case, that’s Webspark—and

then leverage the Pantheon platform so that everybody at the

university, even if they are new to Drupal, can create a new

website with a click of a button from the approved starting point.”

Finally, Pflueger notes, with Pantheon’s website

management platform, website developers no longer have to

worry about administering the hosting stack. “They don’t have

to think about servers; they don’t have to think about managing

a LAMP stack; they don’t have to worry about uptime or scaling

in cases of a big spike in traffic. Those are all things that the

Pantheon platform takes care of for them, so developers can

focus entirely on their websites.”

asU WebsPark“Of course, once you have the platform,” says Mike Pirog, co-

founder of Kalamuna, a digital agency and the third partner in

this collaborative effort, “you still have a blank canvas. On top

of that you have to develop products that university and faculty

members can use. And that’s what ASU Webspark is—an

innovative new site building tool, based on Drupal.”

According to Pirog, Webspark is designed to make it

possible for developers to create a feature-rich website

without in-depth technical knowledge. He says Kalamuna built

Drupal distribution tailored to ASU, based on two fundamental

pieces of technology:

a really great authoring experience, inherited from the

base Drupal distribution Panopoly, that’s easy for smaller

tech teams to use without having to do a lot of Drupal

configuration or site configuration; and

the Kalatheme subtheme generator, which leverages the

twitter bootstrap framework and really saves developers

a lot of time when it comes to standardizing how the site

looks, the mark up of the site, and being able to spin out

sub themes really quickly.

At the end of the day, Pirog explains, ASU Webspark makes

it easy for even those who are new to Drupal to build Drupal

sites. “You go on to Pantheon, you click on a button, you get

an ASU branded website, and you choose a bunch of options

in terms of what you want the site to look like. Within minutes

you’re building a site really easily, instead of having to spend a

lot of time setting it up or hiring someone to set it up for you.”

Today, with ASU Webspark, any ASU affiliate (anyone with

an ASU.edu email) can spin up a development site in less than

15 minutes. At the same time, it is easy to customize an ASU

Webspark site with different layouts and built-in features.

UTO has made significant changes to Webspark since

it was delivered to the office. For example, UTO built a new

theme called Innovation (which is Kalatheme subtheme) and

added new features to bring Webspark in compliance with

the new ASU Web Standards. Garcia-Mont said, “We took

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the Webspark that Kalamuna built and we have continued to

develop it. ASU affiliates are now starting on the 12th floor and

we continue to build floors.”

The advanTages of oUT-soUrCing WiTh PanTheonAccording to Garcia-Mont, there are a number of advantages to

Pantheon’s hosting service, including the dev-test-live workflow

environments. “The dev-test-live workflow really helped us a

lot,” he says. “From a developer’s point of view, it’s amazing.”

In addition Garcia-Mont points to several other benefits of

outsourcing the ASU web hosting service to Pantheon, including:

Managing all Drupal and WordPress sites on Pantheon’s

developer dashboard

The ability to spin up a sandbox site in just a couple of

minutes

Integration with GIT for versioning control

Improved security with one-click core and patch updates

Out-of-the-box New Relic integration. (“It gives us

information about the site’s performance that we didn’t

have before,” Garcia-Mont says.)

Garcia-Mont is also pleased with Pantheon’s pricing

model. “It let us pay for what we used as we ramped up,

rather than put up a lot of money upfront for capacity that we

wouldn’t be using right away.”

Finally, according to Garcia-Mont notes, “Pantheon really

has great customer service.”

ConClUsionToday, the process of ramping up and getting UTO customers

transitioned from ASU’s legacy web hosting service onto

Pantheon continues. “Over the next two years,” says Garcia-

Mont, “every site that uses the ASU.edu website domain space

will need to be web-standard compliant. We’re working with

departments and units to transition to this new web standard

through Webspark.”

So far the only downside in the transition from self-hosting to

Pantheon, according to Garcia-Mont, is getting people used to

the fact that they now have to pay for hosting just the same as

they pay for telephone services or university parking. “We shifted

from a free hosting service to a subsidized hosting service in

which departments and units pay for hosting based on a service

level plan. Their mindset is that it was free before and it should

be free now, but we’re educating them about that,” he says.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt the partnership is helping

UTO fulfill its original goal of providing the best information

technology tools for the university community. “We’re

transforming the entire web development process,” says

Garcia-Mont. “We’re providing the best experience possible for

development, deployment, and maintenance.”

Pantheon Pantheon is the website management

platform top developers, marketers, and

IT use to build, launch and run all their

Drupal & WordPress websites.

Pantheon includes all of the

tools professional developers need

to build best-practice sites—like

staging environments, version control,

backups and workflow. Powering

85,000+ sites with hundreds of

millions of pageviews, Pantheon’s

container-based infrastructure allows

developers, agencies and web

teams to launch websites faster,

without worrying about traffic spikes,

security or performance. It’s free

in development. Sites can scale in

software on the same infrastructure

from day one, and never touch a

server again.

Headquartered in San Francisco,

Pantheon is privately held and backed

by Foundry Group, First Round Capital,

Baseline Ventures & FLOODGATE.

To learn more about Pantheon, visit

getpantheon.com

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