How Oregon State University manages 1,000 Drupal sites, and how to learn from our mistakes.

BACKGROUND:

Oregon State University has been using Drupal on a large scale since well back in the Drupal 4 days. We've had to come up with some unique solutions to providing a large number of Drupal sites before tools like Drush and Aegir existed. We are now working on how to take advantage of the latest tools, while maintaining and improving upon the functionality we already have.
Target audience:

This is a technical discussion aimed at the people who need to support a large scale Drupal deployment. This includes system architects, drupal managers, and drupal developers.

TOPICS:

The pros and cons of our homegrown web application to manage Drupal sites.

Managing site owners and responsible individuals.

Drupal directory structure and what we did differently.

Automated site deployment with python and drush.

A look at our install profile.

Managing our code base and custom development.

How we do bulk updates.

Automating Cron.

Scaling the front end

Caching
Load balancing
Web server cluster
MySQL cluster
What works well and what we need to do differently.

Our next generation Drupal architecture and how we're going to get there.