Sector(s)
Project Team
- SparkFabrik: Cloud/Platform Engineering, DevOps, Drupal Development, Data Engineering
- Il Giornale On Line srl: internal development team, editorial staff
Il Giornale is a long-established Italian newspaper with a large online audience at ilgiornale.it, publishing web content, digital editions of the print paper, and a set of regularly updated thematic blogs. Serving several million pages and users every day demands flexible infrastructure that absorbs traffic spikes and a highly reliable service so the editorial team can publish around the clock.
Since 2019 SparkFabrik has supported the publisher's internal team, managing the cloud platform and evolving the Drupal-based CMS that powers the site. The engagement began with a full handover of a system originally built by others, followed by an assessment of both the infrastructure and the Drupal application.
About the project
Goals
Support Il Giornale's internal team in managing its cloud platform and evolve the Drupal CMS in a cloud-native direction, improving reliability, performance, and cost while enabling the newsroom to publish continuously and expand toward multichannel content delivery.
Challenge
SparkFabrik inherited a platform built by others on a proprietary, non-transferable provisioning mechanism, a delicate handover with a lot of implicit knowledge to surface. The assessment revealed single points of failure and recurring business-continuity issues, a heterogeneous mix of native cloud services and custom networking and storage, and code-versioning and deployment practices that could be safer and more productive. All of this had to be fixed under a site serving millions of daily users without interrupting editorial work.
Solution
The team rebuilt an accurate map of the infrastructure and services from real cloud API data, then assessed the Drupal application powering ilgiornale.it and its satellite properties, along with traffic and running costs. Work then proceeded on several fronts:
- Content and API evolution in Drupal: extended the CMS with richer functionality and metadata, strengthened relationships between content types, added editorial workflows including production-cost monitoring, and expanded the CMS API layer toward multichannel delivery and future integrations
- Front-end modernization: evolved the CMS so the front-end could be reworked for a more functional, modern user experience
- Reliability and delivery: container-based build for local development, continuous integration in staging, and automated delivery aligned with editorial rhythms
- Cloud-native infrastructure: balanced traffic across availability zones to remove single points of failure, replaced the obsolete provisioner with modern infrastructure-as-code, and optimized compute and autoscaling
- Data platform: a customizable, real-time marketing dashboard consolidating analytics and application logs
Outcome
- A Drupal CMS evolved for a modern front-end and richer editorial workflows, with an extended API layer ready for multichannel content
- Reliable, scalable operation for a site serving millions of daily users, with single points of failure removed
- Faster disaster recovery and stronger security across the platform
- Editorial access statistics consolidated into a dashboard for analysis and planning
- Reduced running costs for the instances that power editorial publishing
The partnership tying us to SparkFabrik rests on values like passion, professionalism and transparency, doing business to grow together and improve each other.
Simone Procopio, Chief Technology Officer, ilGiornale.it
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was already the content management system powering ilgiornale.it when SparkFabrik took over the platform in 2019. Rather than replatform a busy newsroom, the existing Drupal application was assessed, retained, and modernized, and Drupal proved well suited to the demands of a high-volume news operation:
- High-volume publishing: Drupal handles a large, constantly updated body of articles, digital editions, and thematic blogs under heavy daily traffic
- Structured, related content: articles, content types, and metadata can be modeled and cross-linked so editors manage a complex catalog of content coherently
- API extensibility: Drupal's web-service APIs let the platform expand toward multichannel delivery and future integrations without disrupting the newsroom
- Editorial continuity: the CMS could be evolved incrementally, enriching content, adding editorial workflows and cost-monitoring, while the site stayed live
- Open source and cloud-friendly: Drupal runs well in a scalable, containerized cloud, with no per-seat licensing
Technical Specifications
Drupal's web-service APIs were central: extending the CMS API layer turned the platform into a more manageable, evolvable application layer and opened the way to multichannel delivery. Structured content types and metadata let a high-volume newsroom keep a large, fast-changing body of content coherent and cross-linked, while Drupal's extensibility allowed new editorial workflows and integrations to be added incrementally without taking the live site down.
