Try Before You Buy: User Provisioned Sites Targeting Multiple Hosting Providers

This presentation will introduce the Cyclone contrib module along with Cyclone Jenkins which contains scripts to automate the site building process. The system is completely pluggable allowing for the addition of new hosting providers and methods of building sites.

The Drupal hosting market has matured significantly in recent years. There are a wide variety of hosting solutions (Aberdeen, Acquia, Aegir, Pantheon and others) which provide the ability to easily clone sites from a master template site. This has been a big win for Drupal shops as it is now easy to spin up sites from within the management consoles of the hosting providers. However, this is considered an "admin" function, not suitable for end users.

We will present a new Drupal module, Cyclone, which presents a Drupal based front end for provisioning sites, making it possible for end users to spin sites as they desire. We will show how it is possible to extend standard nodes or Commerce products to drive the provisioning process. The end result is a one click provisioning process which will have the user editing their own site in a couple of minutes.

This presentation will cover:
- the various hosting options and their APIs
- the Drupal contrib module which drives the system
- the Jenkins and Fabric backend used to build the sites
- a demonstration of the system in action.

The talk will be of interest to:
- Dev ops: a mix of APIs and systems coordinated by Jenkins.
- Site builders: an extensible architecture using ctools plugins.
- Distro owners: a way to make your site available to potential customers.
- Trainers: a way to build test sites for your students.

The talk will be of an intermediate to advanced level as APIs, coding techniques and architecture will be discussed. However, the talk should still be of interest to those who would like to see a one click provisioning process in action. More information is available at the Cyclone project.