“Death Star” security happens whenever a system relies entirely on an outermost security layer — and fails catastrophically when breached. Especially as stack layers multiply, they shouldn’t all run in a single, trusted virtual private cloud (or similar isolation in a traditional data center). Sharing secrets doesn’t scale, either, as systems multiply and external services integrate with your site and user base.
Almost everyone in the Drupal community knows what Apache Solr is. It's the most venerable full text search engine in the open source world, and it's integration with Drupal is very full featured. Just set it up and it runs.
Fewer developers know about the other cool things you can do with it using features that are built in to Solr and supported by the contrib module community.
A technical site audit is often the first step when a development team takes on an existing build. It can also be a stand-alone project to get expert advice for re-orienting technical efforts.
A good audit looks everywhere and sees everything. A bad audit is mostly just a report using a template from a previous audit or relies primarily on only automated methods.
Auditing is not just an explicit exercise, but a frame of mind you can use throughout projects to keep standards high and focus on the longterm quality of work.
Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams keep producing valuable software in short cycles and ensure that the software can be reliably released at any time [1]. The critical thing in continuous delivery is that the main branch is in a deployable state at all times enabling regular releases. I have spent a lot of time working to achieve this goal in Drupal and I can say that implementing CD in Drupal 7 can be tricky but it can also be insanely powerful.
