University of Surrey optimizes developer operations by shifting to Upsun

Note: This case study was initially published under the Platform.sh brand. It has been republished (updated) to reflect our new name, Upsun. All results and insights remain unchanged

With a history dating back to 1891, the University of Surrey has never been afraid to evolve. In fact, in 1956, the University was one of the first institutions to be named a college of advanced technology. 

To date, Surrey has welcomed more than 140,000 students through its doors, including its current class of ~15,000 students. The Surrey Research Park continues the institute’s legacy of collaboration, adaptation, and innovation.

So it’s no surprise that Surrey’s digital team has high standards for its underlying technology. But in 2014, their decentralized suite of websites became too challenging to manage; with clunky operations and lengthy publishing times, something had to change. 

Unfortunately, it wasn’t an instant fix. The digital team endured two years of trial and error, searching for a system to simplify DevOps, giving developers more time to focus on code and innovation.

The shift away from on-premises hosting

Historically, the University's IT team had managed and hosted the digital team's websites on-premises. But when the IT team added Drupal on top of their legacy content management system, they also added layers of complexity. Although a full switch to Drupal was imminent, the IT team didn't have the resources to maintain Drupal, along with the rest of the digital team's tech stack, in-house.

While a few of the digital team’s 10 websites were low maintenance, many of them required daily changes. An overnight publishing process impacted team agility and their ability to give attention to high-value work. It was clear that on-premises hosting just didn’t make sense anymore. The Surrey team needed a new solution—fast.

Initially, they chose Acquia to carry them through their transition to managed services. But as the development team grew, so did the tool’s constraints. With the original team size of 3 devs, communications and collaboration around a single dev environment was possible—but with 8 developers, it was unsustainable.

Surrey Lead Digital Developer Daniel Gittings recalls that developers were frequently forced to wait until the only dev environment was available. This created significant delays, which the team was eager to overcome—but that meant another system migration. To make a strategic and lasting decision, they outlined their must-haves for the new platform. 

• Seamlessly integrates with Drupal and GitHub
• Offers preview environments for user acceptance testing (UAT) to foster real-time collaboration and rapid approvals
• Scales to accommodate larger teams and additional sites
• Provides responsive, caring customer support 

After vetting a few options, Upsun emerged as the best choice for all these needs.

Surrey developers share why Upsun is the right long-term partner

Since the switch to Upsun eight years ago, it’s been more convenient and simpler than ever for Surrey to scale, adding sites to their portfolio as the need arises. Here’s what Surrey lead digital dev team members Daniel Gittings (DG) and Chandra Rajakumar (CR) value most about Upsun services and support.

Seamless integration, configuration, and capabilities

I personally quite like the way projects are configured with the YAML files and how you can sort of spec them out that way…The GitHub integration, the creation of those UAT sites: we didn't have that before, so that really was a huge game-changer for us. It's just so seamless the way Upsun fit into the way we were working already, and I guess we didn't really know it until we started doing it.

Daniel Gittings
Lead Digital Developer

Simplified review cycles

Upsun is just such a great way for us to work with our extended team. I think having to create those kind of UAT sites manually would drive us insane. So having it completely hands-off, just done for us is a massive time-saver.

Daniel Gittings
Lead Digital Developer

Customer support and rapid response times

It was such a wonderful experience working with your team. They were so amazing in doing any migrations, helping to resolve any customer support tickets we created. They were so wonderful.

Chandra Rajakumar
Lead Digital Developer

The people we work with are lovely. When you've got something fairly urgent, it's nice to know that we can get a quick response. I can't think of any time that we couldn't get the support we needed, when we needed it.

Daniel Gittings
Lead Digital Developer

Standing the test of time

Surrey’s digital team has undergone structural changes over the years. Developers have come and gone. Surrey recently rebranded, requiring changes to their suite of sites. But they say the Upsun team has given them the confidence to weather it all.

And as Surrey approaches a decade of partnering with Upsun, the digital team is grateful for the efficiency, collaboration, and agility they’ve gained. The seamless integration, combined with robust support and configuration flexibility, has enabled the university to maintain a smooth and productive digital presence. And as the university continues to grow and evolve, Upsun remains a trusted partner in their digital transformation journey.

We haven't really had any big dramas or issues that would cause us to want to leave,” says Gittings. “I think giving us that kind of confidence is just pretty positive for us; the lack of negatives really speaks for itself.

Daniel Gittings
Lead Digital Developer