"Don't Touch that Server": A toolkit for zero-touch production environments

The more access you provide to your production servers, the more risk you have of someone doing something "unexpected" either at the shell or on an administrative screen they don't full understand. A great way to address this risk is to limit access to production servers only to emergency. But how do this and still get any work done?

Combining Drupal tools like Drush, modules like Features and Strongarm, and common build, integration, and configuration management tools (like Bamboo, Phing, and Puppet) gets us close to the elusive "zero-touch" goal. Using these tools you can eliminate the need for shell access and greatly limit the need to log into the admin interface for anything but editing content -- if we add deploy to the mix we don't even need it for that!

This session will discuss an approach to zero-touch and the tools used to get there, along with the compromises required with today's state of the art and what's required to address them in the future.