From Midnight Deployments to Unicorns and Rainbows: The UCLA Digital Transformation Story

"During major deployments, we found ourselves working through the night," Paul Babin, Web Systems Manager at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, told the audience at DrupalCon. "Our monitoring alerts would buzz incessantly telling us what we already knew: our sites were down during these lengthy update windows."

This scenario is all too familiar in higher education. Web teams across the country face similar challenges: overnight deployments, unexpected site failures, and the constant struggle to maintain complex digital properties with limited resources.

The challenge UCLA faced mirrors what many institutions experience: a small team (just three developers in their case) responsible for a massive digital footprint (174 websites). According to Babin, "Every deployment was a white-knuckle experience, every update a potential disaster, and every support ticket took days, sometimes weeks, to resolve."

Today, UCLA's team tells a different story. Their deployments take minutes instead of hours. As Babin proudly proclaims, "When we push to production, it's unicorns and rainbows!" This dramatic turnaround wasn't magic, but rather the result of implementing modern DevOps practices with the right technology partner.

Here's how they did it, and what we can learn from their transformation.

The Digital Quicksand and Breaking Free: A Higher Ed DevOps Revolution

The reality at UCLA was painfully common in higher education: a slow drowning in complexity. As a former web director, It's a story I know too well.

Each of their 174 websites represented different departments, labs, and programs with unique needs but shared the same sluggish infrastructure. Their multi-site Drupal setup had become a victim of its own success, growing far beyond what the original architecture could gracefully handle.

The symptoms they experienced look remarkably familiar to those working in higher education web development:

• Marathon deployment windows: Each release required a grueling THREE-HOUR deployment process during which content editors couldn't update sites

• The midnight deployment club: Updates had to happen in the dead of night to minimize disruption

• "Is it down or is it just me?": Synthetic monitors would fire off dozens of alerts during updates, creating alarm fatigue

• The support black hole: Support tickets would disappear into the void, with responses taking a day or longer

• Configuration chaos: One change could ripple unpredictably across multiple sites

Many higher education institutions have faced similar scenarios. A simple CSS change can inadvertently break navigation across dozens of departmental sites. Content editors might be locked out of making urgent updates during critical periods. Support tickets disappear into a void, with responses taking days or even weeks.

As Babin explained at DrupalCon, "Why we're here is the accumulation of three months of work to migrate approximately 174 sites over to Pantheon." But this wasn't just about migration, it was about transformation.

After years of band-aid solutions, the UCLA team knew they needed something radical. The status quo wasn't just inefficient, it was actively preventing their institution from moving forward.

Their stakeholder pitch used the necessary corporate language: "Infrastructure differences facilitate paradigm shifts in workflows, providing developer experiences, development efficiencies, better user experiences, and offloading work to our partners." Behind those words was a simple truth: the team was drowning and needed a lifeline.

The plan was bold: completely rebuild their digital workflow around a DevOps philosophy with Pantheon as their platform partner. This meant:

1. Parallelizing everything: No more serial deployments that took hours

2. Automating the tedious: Creating scripts that turned hours of manual work into minutes of automated tasks

3. Embracing multi-environment testing: Moving from local-only development to true multi-environment workflows

4. Offloading infrastructure headaches: Letting specialists handle CDN and WAF management

The Migration Miracle and Transformation in Numbers

The UCLA team's conservative timeline estimated two weeks, moving just two sites per day. The reality was astonishing.

Using Terminus and parallel processing, they created 174 sites in 36 MINUTES. That's not a typo. What would have been weeks of tedious work was done in less time than it takes to watch a sitcom episode.

Then came the real test: migrating all databases and files. Using a combination of Terminus and rsync, they moved everything, ALL databases and files for ALL sites, in less than a day. Six hours, to be exact.

As Babin shared at DrupalCon, "I set it, forget it, went down, made food for my family, came up, and then everything had been migrated over."

But the migration was just the beginning.

The results weren't just good, they were career-changing. Here's what happened:

• 86% faster response time for all their sites, immediately improving user experience

• 85% reduction in deployment downtime, from 3+ hours to just 10-15 minutes

• 92% faster issue resolution with support responses in hours instead of days

• 52 engineering days saved annually by eliminating manual troubleshooting and inefficient workflows

The most dramatic change came in their deployment process. A job that once dragged on for three hours in the dead of night is now a tidy ten-to-fifteen minute routine that can run while the team polishes off lunch. Thanks to Pantheon it is not just faster, it is rock-solid: the developers can push the button during business hours without fretting over downtime. No more midnight deployments. No more bleary-eyed troubleshooting.

I can only imagine what our team could do with an extra 52 engineering days per year. Currently, we spend approximately 40% of our development time on maintenance and troubleshooting rather than building new features. The prospect of reclaiming that time is enticing.

DevOps in Action: Technical Solutions and Human Impact

UCLA's transformation wasn't just about switching platforms, it was about fundamentally changing how they approached web development. Their old process was like standing in the world's slowest checkout line. Now, they process everything simultaneously through parallelization. What took hours now takes minutes.

Testing With Actual Confidence

Their QA process used to involve crossing fingers and hoping for the best. Now, each change gets thoroughly tested in isolated multi-dev environments. Code linting catches issues before they become problems, and Cypress testing verifies functionality before anything reaches production.

When testing in isolated environments was mentioned during Babin's presentation, many web directors in the audience nodded in recognition. Deploying changes without adequate testing environments is a common pain point across higher education. The ability to test in identical environments can save days of emergency fixes that often follow production deployments based solely on local testing.

Custom Tooling for Higher Ed Realities

Using Robo taskrunner (the same technology powering both Terminus and Drush), they built custom tools that embed their institutional rules into simple command-line interfaces. This means any developer on their team can execute complex processes without remembering byzantine procedures.

"I am a huge fan of Robo taskrunner," Babin explained during his presentation. "The nice thing if you take and build your own Robo taskrunner is you can get the same command line interface questions for yourself. I'm able to build our institutional rules into simple command line code."

The Human Side of Technical Transformation

The most meaningful changes weren't technical, they were human:

For content editors, the constant fear of "is the site going to work today?" evaporated. Faculty members could update critical information without worrying about system stability.

For their developers, life literally improved. No more dreaded release days. No more weekend emergencies. No more explaining to family why they needed to stay up all night "just in case."

As Babin shared in his presentation title, switching to this approach "gave me my life back." It's not an exaggeration.

The human cost of technical debt in higher education is substantial. Developer burnout is a significant problem across the industry, with many institutions losing talented staff due to the constant stress of maintaining aging infrastructure.

The stress reduction alone was worth the migration effort for UCLA. Their team now spends time on innovation rather than maintenance, creating new features instead of troubleshooting old problems.

Starting Your Journey and Embracing Innovation

If you're seeing your own reality in UCLA's old struggles, here's how to begin your own transformation:

1. Document your pain points meticulously: Hard numbers make compelling arguments to leadership

2. Start small but think big: Begin with non-critical sites to refine your approach

3. Automate from day one: Even simple scripts can dramatically reduce human error

4. Build for your institution's realities: Custom tools that respect your governance structure are worth their weight in gold

5. Choose partners, not just platforms: Support quality matters more than feature checklists

Many universities are beginning their own transformation journeys. The first step is often documenting exactly how much time is spent on maintenance versus innovation. For many institutions, nearly half of developer hours go to keeping the lights on rather than moving forward. Armed with this data, IT leaders can make a compelling case for meaningful change.

The Freedom to Say "Yes"

The greatest gift of UCLA's transformation is the freedom to say "yes" again.

• When departments need new functionality, they can deliver it without fear

• When challenges arise (like LLM crawlers hammering search pages), they can respond quickly

• When students need information, pages load in milliseconds, not seconds

The bottleneck is no longer their infrastructure or processes, it's simply imagination and priorities.

Trading Technical Debt for Digital Dividends

Three years ago, Paul Babin was staying up for midnight deployments, dreading every release, watching his professional life consumed by maintenance instead of creation. Today, he's speaking at conferences, confidently sharing how his systems are running smoothly.

The transformation wasn't easy, it required confronting years of technical debt, challenging established processes, and learning new skills. But according to Babin, it was worth it.

If you're standing where UCLA once stood, looking at a digital ecosystem that's consuming more than it's giving, know that there is a way out. Higher education deserves better than midnight deployments and perpetual firefighting.

Your institution and your sleep schedule will thank you.

Paul Babin is the Web Systems Manager at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he leads a three-person development team supporting over 170 websites. This article is based on his presentation at DrupalCon and the documented case study of UCLA's digital transformation.