DevPanel has been percolating and building steam for many years now, coming out of a desire to make developing Drupal sites (and other applications), deploying them into a production environment, and managing them ongoing from there should be easy. Our community has had a collective desire for this type of tooling for a long time. For enterprise and large-budget organizations, platforms like Acquia and Pantheon are a valuable service, complete with enterprise-grade support, development expertise, and all the bells and whistles.
What if you’re just a single developer or a small team building a handful of sites, and you only need a few bells and whistles? Shared hosting environments are not usually a great experience, and dedicated VMs still require care and maintenance. Or perhaps you’re just looking to experiment with DrupalCMS or another Template you’ve heard about. DevPanel actually drives the backend of DrupalForge.org, serving exactly that need.
DevPanel enables you to bring your own infrastructure, so you can choose a provider and manage that cost directly. This requires a Kubernetes cluster, which is not for the faint of heart, but certainly can be worthwhile if you’re hosting more than a few applications. What’s more, DevPanel manages the cluster on your behalf, so there’s little to no need to interact with it directly (although you can, if you are so inclined!)
We’ll give a tour of the DevPanel dashboard, to demonstrate:
- Cloud Provider integration and Cluster connections (Workspaces)
- Creating a Project (from scratch or a Template)
- Deploying a site instance from a project branch
- Attaching a custom domain to a deployed site instance
- Configuring CI webhooks for GitOps functionality
- Attaching to VSCode server to make a development change
- Updating a deployed instance with new changes
