In 2012, the car sharing company that many of us know and love was growing internationally and was about to enter their fourth international market which required support for two additional languages. The technology team at Zipcar realized they needed to re-platform their legacy website using a modern content management system that would ease international expansion and help ease website support burdens. A second but equally important goal was to empower their marketing team to launch campaigns and respond to consumers much more quickly and in a streamlined way that did not depend on engineering release cycles for every site change. After considering several options, the Zipcar team decided that Drupal was the best option for their needs and culture. In the fast-paced car sharing environment, the engineering team's plan also included a vision for unattended/push-button deployments into dev, qa, and prod environments; automated testing; and high availability in multiple data centers around the globe. In this session, we will describe the architectural considerations, tools and techniques used by Zipcar, along with their Drupal partner HS2 Solutions, in building the new Zipcar.com into a global platform to enhance their business.

Architecture
* Original architecture was designed to be active/active in the UK and US data centers – Why did that fail?
* What did the architecture evolve into? Pros and cons of the new architecture?
* How to sleep better at night: Systems monitoring and alerting.
Development
* Best Practices for Drupal and PHP, in theory and practice.
* Tweaks to get the most performance out of the site.
* What would we do differently next time?
i18n
* Integrating with a third-party translation service.
* Managing multiple languages in multiple sites. How does that work?
* What would we do differently next time?
Automation & Continuous Integration
* Jenkins: Jack of all trades, master of all.
* Keeping the data in sync between the development, qa, and production systems.
* Drush scripting and no-touch releases to production.
* Fool me once, shame on me, won't get fooled again: Automated JMeter and Selenium tests to prevent reintroducing bugs.