back to article Australia targets software maintenance costs with Drupal plan

Software maintenance costs Australia's government will today hand down its annual budget, a document that is expected to result in the closure and/or merger of around 70 government agencies as part of an austerity drive designed to reduce government debt. Those left standing after the resulting “machinery of government changes …

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  1. Cliff

    Makes a lot of sense

    Drupal is pretty solid, competitively priced, and ideal for providing a CMS backbone for any large sprawling source such as government. Different faces of it can be themed up for departments. It's not a total solution as any interactive services need to be routed elsewhere, but just in terms of stopping all the homespun micro sites it's a great choice.

    1. Matt 21

      Re: Makes a lot of sense

      I haven't got a lot of experience with Drupal but I know it's not hard to integrate Joomla with interactive services. Making templates is fairly easy and there are lots of free ones available (even the commercial ones don't cost much). I assume the same is true of Dupal.

      1. Captain Scarlet Silver badge

        Re: Makes a lot of sense

        Yes there are a lot of CMS's that can do it, which is the beauty of using CMS's based on scripting languages such as PHP, Perl, ASP (Other Languages are available).

        All have ability to have add-ons or you can simply just modify it and hack it to do what you want.

        1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
          Thumb Down

          Re: Makes a lot of sense

          Most of the PHP-based CMS (you have to use the term very loosely to include Joomla with them) have a very long list of CVEs. Sure, you can build secure sites with them but you're the one who'll be doing the security. Furthermore, for government sites there's something to be said for security through diversity: crack one site and you've cracked them all and they might have data you don't want leaking.

          Drupal is in vogue especially since whitehouse,gov went on it but that doesn't make it good. And it isn't cheap once the SIs get involved. So, while the licensing will be cheap, what about the customisations? And what is the performance when you have 50 or so editors working on the same site (not unusual for government departments)?

          1. Tim Bates

            Re: Makes a lot of sense

            "Most of the PHP-based CMS have a very long list of CVEs"

            That's hardly surprising since most of those are also free, which makes them extremely popular.

            Increased popularity means increased attention, which means more eyes looking for bugs.

            My home brew CRM has zero reported security flaws. Doesn't actually improve it's security.

  2. Denarius
    Meh

    back to the past...

    so after all the modern management and individual departmental software contracts since 1998 the elected PHBs discover it does not work in cost reduction, so they are going to a common platform. Hmm, How far will that go ? Just hope there is no machine intelligence involved in the content management system or some Treasury and AG docs will have the machine think it would prefer talking to Marvin the paranoid Android. Then again, the martian one also sounds familiar in there judging by some of the non-privacy announcements from AGs.

  3. caffeine addict

    Drupal? Really?

    I've never seen a company move to Drupal and not regret it. Maybe it provides what you need if you're coming from a non-CMS environment, but whenever I've seen someone go from another CMS to Drupal, it's triggered more moaning than a switch to Lotus Notes would have done.

    1. Frankee Llonnygog

      We don't regret it

      And Drupal is not a CMS

    2. Frankee Llonnygog

      whenever I've seen someone go from another CMS to Drupal, it's triggered more moaning

      Are you prepared to make an exception if the original CMS was Teamsite? (Oh why did I remind myself...)

  4. batfastad

    Crap performance

    With the immense flexibility that Drupal offers, especially when using multi-site platforms with something like Aegir, comes terrible performance. I mean truly unimagineably terrible performance on a scale I've only ever witnessed with Java monsters like Alfresco.

    In my experience the only way to get even passable performance out of Drupal, is to not use Drupal at all! I'm not being a smart-arse. By that I mean cache the b*****ks off it, using nginx or Varnish as a caching reverse proxy so most front-end requests never actually hit Drupal. For it to even work for a small number of users you'll definitely need Drupal's caching, APC and memcached. Oh and get your databases on flash storage/SSD as Drupal eats DB i/o.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Crap performance

      I'm surprised as I've had good experience with Joomla on popular sites and I thought Drupal was much the same.

      1. batfastad

        Re: Crap performance

        We did loads of performance testing with JMeter and AB when migrating stuff to a shared Drupal/Aegir platform. We had a jungle of sites all running different CMSs (custom/Joomla/Wordpress/Typo3) and each of those were able to easily handle at least 50x more requests per second than out of the box Drupal.

        Once we added Drupal caching backed by memcached and APC, then that brought Drupal up to and slightly exceeding the performance levels of our existing CMSs. Until we added APC/memcached to our existing CMSs that is, then Drupal was playing catch-up again.

        Honestly, Drupal is an absolute slug and not for the feint hearted.

        We still chose it as dealing with one horrible beast of a CMS is easier than dealing with 5+ horrible but much less-beastly CMSs. And once you've got a caching proxy layer then Drupal becomes irrelevant apart from for content editors.

        1. Matt 21

          Re: Crap performance

          Thanks for the reply. Nice to know, I will avoid Drupal for busy sites.

          1. batfastad

            Re: Crap performance

            Oh I wouldn't say that at all. Check out http://www.whitehouse.gov a busy site running Drupal. But they're running all requests through a Varnish cache so Drupal itself doesn't ever have to do much.

            I like Drupal's flexibility* but expect to put in some work and get some dedicated infrastructure if you're going to be busy.

            * though overall it's my least favourite because of the low performance baseline. All CMSs I've ever worked with are basically rubbish and the only way to get what you really want with excellent performance is to go custom and do it yourself.

        2. Wensleydale Cheese

          Re: Crap performance

          "Honestly, Drupal is an absolute slug and not for the feint hearted."

          I am curious. Which version of Drupal is that?

          I still have a low volume Drupal 6 site. When I looked at upgrading to 7 my trusty but old laptop couldn't cope with the bloat/Ajax/whatever else that lobbed to the client so I abandoned the idea.

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  6. Jeff 11

    Drupal is fundamentally crap for performance because of its modular approach - bootstrapping every single installed module on every single page request makes it incredibly sluggish. One of our sites runs an enormously customised Drupal 6 installation and we've had to roll in hundreds of optimisations and low level techniques to get it to run at an acceptable level of performance when it needs to execute dynamically. It doesn't matter which version you use - the everything including the kitchen sink approach will never match rivals that are built around lazy loading of functionality for performance.

    On the plus side, it's the quickest PHP-based CMS I've encountered for prototyping and building new functionality, and extending existing functionality - but you need the capability to optimise your critical, high-traffic paths through your site you'll end up with an obese, wheezing dog of a responsive experience.

  7. Frankee Llonnygog

    Platform choice aside

    Building a platform is what UK government should have done, rather than building a single website. That is, if the UK Gov agenda had really been about cost-effectiveness, and not about politicising all government web publishing and centralising control under Francis Maude

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Platform choice aside

      since when did a Gov's public Agenda reflect reality? Any flavour of government - from Mr Maude's centralised control to Mr Brown's control freakery - seems to just want power for the sake of having power, yet abrogate responsibility wherever possible .....

  8. A Twig
    Headmaster

    I've re-read this sentence 7 times, it still doesn't make sense?

    "Software maintenance costs Australia's government will today hand down its annual budget, a document that is expected to result in the closure and/or merger of around 70 government agencies as part of an austerity drive designed to reduce government debt."

    1. Flat Phillip
      Alien

      Might need a translator

      I didn't know Yoda was on the editorial board now. It didn't read too well for me either.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "The choice of Drupal is aimed squarely at capital and recurring costs: the FAQ (PDF) provided by the Department calls out software maintenance costs as something to be avoided. The document also says “GovCMS intends to use a Software-as-a-Service vendor to reduce the requirement for upfront investment to establish the platform.” "

    Software maintenance costs are something to be avoided but SaaS isn't? I'm not sure it work out particularly better as aren't you effectively outsourcing both the software maintenance cost and the hardware maintenance cost and I'm sure they won't be doing it at break-even.

  10. Glen Turner 666

    Drupal's performance is fine. View Varnish, memcached, APC as part of the product.

    To my mind there's two issues. Firstly, authentication and authorisation. Because if you stuff that up, then hey, you've turned defacement of one site into a denial-of-service against government.

    Secondly, the software-as-a-service outsourcing. That contract will need to be carefully written because flash loads on government websites have to be met. 404-ing a heap of affected people trying to access a information page about a natural disaster isn't acceptable. Furthermore, the site might need to refuse some users whilst allowing others -- as happens with the CSIRO maps of bushfire activity: the same content is presented to the public and to bushfire controllers, but access by bushfire controllers superceeds best effort.

    Similarly the physical location of the service matters. There's no use having all of the Australian government web sites on servers in Singapore or the west coast of the USA. Because when the going gets tough that data won't be readily accessible. The web sites need to have a huge links to peering points on the Australian mainland.

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